Eric Orts, JSD

About Eric

Eric is the Guardsmark Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught since 1991.  He is a tenured professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department with a secondary appointment in the Management Department.  He also serves as the faculty director of the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership and faculty co-director of the FINRA/Wharton Certified Regulatory and Compliance Professional Program. His primary research and teaching interests are in business theory, corporate governance, environmental sustainability, securities regulation, and professional ethics.

Prior to joining Wharton’s faculty, Orts practiced law as an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City and was a Chemical Bank fellow in corporate social responsibility at Columbia Law School.  He has also taught and visited at a number of other leading business and law schools, including (in reversal chronological order): INSEAD (European campus); University of Pennsylvania Law School; NYU School of Law; Sydney Law School; Bren School Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara; Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management; the University of Michigan Law School; and UCLA School of Law.  He has been a visiting Fulbright professor in the law department of the University of Leuven, the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics and the Professions, and a faculty fellow in the Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

Orts graduated Oberlin College (BA with honors in government and a minor in philosophy), the New School for Social Research (MA in political science), the University of Michigan (JD), and Columbia University (JSD).  He is a member of the bar of New York and the District of Columbia, as well as an elected member of the American Law Institute, and he belongs to a number of other professional and academic associations.  He is a founding board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability and serves on the editorial board of Business Ethics Quarterly.  His academic work is widely published.  Recent examples include Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm (Oxford 2013; forthcoming in paperback 2015); “Privacy and Organizational Persons” (with Amy Sepinwall, forthcoming in Minnesota Law Review 2015); and “Climate Contracts” (Virginia Environmental Law Journal 2011).

Read full faculty bio on Wharton website