Zephyr Teachout
Professor of Law
Zephyr Teachout is a Professor at Law at Fordham Law School where she focuses on the intersection of corporate power and political power. She teaches corporations, election law, antitrust, and prosecuting white collar crime. Her most recent book, Break 'em Up (2020), makes a case for reimagining the relationship between democracy and antimonopoly law. Her prior book, Corruption in America (2014), argued that the American constitutional system has an embedded anti-corruption principle that has been discarded by the modern Court. Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, The Nation and The New Republic. In 2021, she took a leave to work as Special Advisor and Senior Counsel for Economic Justice at the New York Attorney General's Office. Before Law School, Zephyr Teachout had a career as a digital consultant and nonprofit entrepreneur, and represented clients on death row in North Carolina. She was a Law Clerk to then-Chief Judge Edward R. Becker., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Education
JD, summa cum laude, Duke Law School
MA, Political Science, Duke University
BA, Yale UniversityRepresentative Publications
Submission for the Record to the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, April 3, 2020
Addressing Facebook and Google’s Harms Through a Regulated Competition Approach, American Economic Liberties Project, Working Paper Series on Corporate Powers, #2, April 2020
Antitrust Law, Freedom, and Human Development, Cardozo Law Review, Feb. 2020, Vol. 41 Issue 3, p1081-1140. 60p
From Private Bads to Public Goods: Adapting Public Utility Regulation for Informational Infrastructure (with Sabeel Rahman), Feb. 4, 2020
The Problem of Monopolies and Corporate Political Corruption, Daedalus, Volume 147, Issue 3, Summer 2018, p.111-126
Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press 2014)
Legalism and Devolution of Power in the Public Sphere: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street, 39 Fordham Urban Law Journal 101 (2014)
Market Structure and Political Law: A Taxonomy of Power, 9 Duke Journal of Law and Constitutional Policy 37 (2014)
Gifts, Offices, and Corruption, Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, Vol. 107, p. 1 (2012)
Facts in Exile: Corruption and Abstraction in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 42 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 295 (Winter 2011).
How Anarchists and Academics Created Corporate Speech, 5 Harvard Law and Policy Review 163 (2011)
The Historical Roots of Citizens United v. FEC: How Anarchists and Academics Accidentally Created Corporate Speech Rights, Harvard Law and Policy Review, Vol. 5, p. 163, 2011
The Unenforceable Corrupt Contract: Corruption and 19th Century Contract Law, NYU Review of Law and Social Change, Vol. 35, p. 693, 2011
Extraterritorial Electioneering and the Globalization of American Elections, BERKELEY J. INT’L L. 161 (2009).
The Anti-Corruption Principle, 94 CORNELL L. REV. 341 (2009).
Original Intent: How the Founding Fathers Would Clean Up K Street, DEMOCRACY: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS 11 (Winter 2009).
Mouse Pads, Shoe Leather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics (Paradigm Press, 2007) (ed. with T. Streeter).
Note, Defining and Punishing Abroad: The Extraterritorial Reach of the Offenses Clause, 48 Duke Law Journal 1305 (1999)