An internationally recognised scholar of constitutional law and corporate governance, Kent Greenfield is Professor of Law and Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. Professor Greenfield is a frequent commentator on broadcast and cable news programs, having appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Fox. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, SCOTUSBlog, the Boston Globe, the American Prospect, Salon, and the Nation. A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Brown University, Greenfield clerked for Justice David H Souter of the United States Supreme Court and practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC.
Professor Greenfield is the author of The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits (Yale, 2011), The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities (Chicago, 2006), and the forthcoming Corporations are People Too (And They Should Act Like It) for Yale University Press. He has authored numerous scholarly articles in leading legal journals including the Yale Law Journal and the Virginia Law Review.
A past chair of the Business Associations Section of the AALS, Professor Greenfield has lectured at over 100 institutions in 38 states and ten countries, and has been a visiting professor at Brown University and the University of Sydney. While at Boston College, he has been the recipient of four teaching awards. He was also the Founder and President of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), the named plaintiff in the 2006 Supreme Court case Rumsfeld v FAIR that challenged the constitutionality of a federal law requiring law schools to assist military employers that discriminated against gay and lesbian students.
Prof. Greenfield also consults with litigators on issues of corporate accountability. He was instrumental in developing the theory of the cases brought against Unocal Corporation for alleged human rights violations committed by the company in Burma, and against Hershey Corporation for the alleged use of child labour in West Africa. Greenfield was also one of the principal authors of an amicus brief signed by 44 corporate law professors in the 2014 case of Hobby Lobby v Sebelius, arguing that the Supreme Court should not extend religious freedom rights to corporations.