Biography
Zephyr Teachout is a Law Professor at Fordham Law School, where she teaches democratic theory, antitrust, and corporate law. She is currently on leave, serving as Senior Counsel for Economic Justice for the New York Attorney General. She was one of the lawyers on the legal team that brought the emoluments lawsuit against Donald Trump in the first weeks after he took office. She has testified in front of Congress and the antitrust caucus on antitrust reform and democracy reform and played a leadership role in shaping state and federal antitrust legislative proposals that would strengthen workers rights relative to corporate concentration.
Teachout writes frequently on corruption and the intersection of big tech and democracy and her writing has appeared in the the New York Times, Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic. Her two recent two books are: Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuffbox to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Break ’em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (2020). Her scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court and state judiciaries.
She played a key role in building the American antitrust movement from 2014-2021, serving as the first Board Chair for Open Markets Institute, an advisor to the American Economic Liberties Project, and a convener of a weekly meeting on antitrust reform.
She has held visiting professorial appointments at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Duke University School of Law and will be visiting at Yale in Spring 2023. Prior to becoming a scholar, she co-founded The Fair Trial Initiative, a project to train criminal defense trial lawyers in capital cases, and was the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization dedicated to governmental transparency. She has also been active in politics, running for office herself.
