Eric W Orts

Eric W. Orts is the Guardsmark Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a tenured full professor in the Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department with a secondary appointment in Management.

Prior to joining Wharton's faculty, he practiced law at Paul Weiss in New York City and was a Chemical Bank fellow in corporate social responsibility at Columbia Law School. He has also had visiting faculty appointments at UCLA, Michigan, Leuven, Tsinghua, UC Santa Barbara, Harvard, Sydney, NYU, and INSEAD.

He is graduate of Oberlin College (BA in government, minor in philosophy), the New School for Social Research (MA in political science), the University of Michigan (JD), and Columbia University (LL.M., JSD).

His primary research interests are in corporate governance, environmental sustainability, business ethics, constitutional law, and business theory. Examples include Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm (Oxford University Press, rev. paperback ed. 2015); The Moral Responsibility of Firms (co-edited with Craig Smith) (Oxford University Press 2017); “The Climate Imperative for Business” (with Brian Berkey), California Management Review (2021); and “Senate Democracy: Our Lockean Paradox,” American University Law Review (2019).

In 2021 on academic leave, he was a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania and learned that he is a better professor than politician.

At Wharton, he was a founding director of the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership and the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. He pioneered and currently teaches an MBA core course on “Business, Social Responsibility, and the Environment,” as well as a cross-listed elective course on “Business, Law, and Democracy.”