Snow was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of Catherine (Howard), a school Teacher, and william Dean Snow, a tax attorney. Snow attended high school at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills, Ohio. He did his undergraduate studies at Kenyon College (where he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity) and the University of Toledo, from which he received a B.A. in 1962. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 1965. From 1965 to 1968, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He completed a Juris Doctor at the George Washington University Law School in 1967 and then worked at the Washington, DC law firm of Wheeler & Wheeler from 1967 to 1972.