Speaker > Biography

Biography of Eric Orts

Eric Orts is the Guardsmark Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor of legal studies and business ethics with a joint appointment in management. He serves as an academic co-director of the NASD Institute at Wharton Certificate Program for compliance and regulatory professionals and directs Wharton’s Environmental Management Program. His primary research and teaching interests are corporate governance, professional ethics, and environmental management. His scholarly work is widely published in academic journals (mostly law reviews) and books.

Prior to joining Wharton's faculty in 1991, Orts practiced law 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 taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and visited at the UCLA School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, Tsinghua University, and Sydney Law School. He has also been 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. In 2005-06, he is a Visiting Professor at NYU Law School where he is helping to establish a new diploma program for international business students in U.S. commercial and corporate law.

Orts is a graduate of Oberlin College (BA), the New School for Social Research (MA), the University of Michigan (JD), and Columbia University (JSD). He is a member of the bar of New York and the District of Columbia, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and belongs to a number of other professional and academic associations.

At Wharton, he teaches undergraduate, MBA, and Ph.D. courses in corporate law, environmental management and policy, introduction to law, and professional ethics.