Eric is the Guardsmark Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics 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 (law), Michigan (law), Leuven (law), Tsinghua (management), UC Santa Barbara (environment), Harvard (ethics and professions), Sydney (law), NYU (law), INSEAD (business), and most recently Columbia (law).
His primary research interests are in corporate governance, environmental sustainability, business ethics, constitutional law, and business theory. Examples of his writings 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).
He is a 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).
At Wharton, he was a founding director of both the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership and the inter-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. He was also a co-director (with the late Bill Tyson and then Jill Fisch) of the FINRA at Wharton executive education program for securities and compliance professionals. In 2021, he was a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania and learned that he is a better professor than politician.
