Richard Painter
Professor of Corporate Law
University of Minnesota Law School
Richard W. Painter has been the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School since 2007. He has served as a tenured member of the law faculty at the University of Oregon School of Law and the University of Illinois College of Law, where he was the Guy Raymond and Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Professor of Law until 2005.
From February 2005 to July 2007, he was Associate Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel’s office, serving as the chief ethics lawyer for the President. He is a member of the American Law Institute and is a reporter for the ALI Principles of Government Ethics. He was Vice Chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) from 2016-2018 and a founding board member of Take Back our Republic, a campaign finance reform organization. He is also on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2014-15 he was a residential fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, which funded his work on a book, Taxation only with Representation: The Conservative Conscience and Campaign Finance Reform (Take Back our Republic, 2016).
Professor Painter has on seven occasions provided invited testimony before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate on government ethics, securities litigation, and/or corporate governance, most recently in September 2020. He has written op-eds on government ethics for various publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and he has been interviewed frequently on government ethics and corporate ethics by national news organizations and talk shows, including appearances on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, ABC News, National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio and Real Time with Bill Maher.
He received his B.A., summa cum laude, in history from Harvard University and his J.D. from Yale University. Following law school, he clerked for Judge John T. Noonan Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit with whom he coauthored three editions of a professional responsibility casebook. He later practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City and Finn Dixon & Herling in Stamford, Connecticut before entering law teaching in 1993.
Session Information:
Friday, November 6th | 11:25 AM – 12:15 PM
General Session | Ethics and the Roles We Play
