Eric W. Orts Guardsmark Professor; Professor, Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management Director, Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership The Wharton School

Wharton Speaker >> Biography

Eric Orts is the Guardsmark Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department with a secondary appointment in Management. He is also the faculty director of the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership and serves as faculty co-director of the FINRA at Wharton Institute. His primary research and teaching interests are in corporate governance, securities regulation, environmental law and policy, and professional ethics. He is the author, for example, of Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm (Oxford University Press 2013).

Prior to joining Wharton's faculty, he practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of other business and law schools, including the University of Leuven (law faculty), the University of Michigan Law School, NYU School of Law, Sydney Law School, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, and UCLA School of Law. He was a 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. He is currently a visiting professor at INSEAD in Fontainebleau.

Orts is a graduate of Oberlin College (BA), 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. He is a founding board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability and serves on the editorial board of Business Ethics Quarterly.

Over the course of his career, he has advised and interacted with a wide range of companies in different sectors and in different countries. In 2011, he won the MBA Excellence in Teaching Award for an Elective Course at the Wharton School.