Kristin N. Johnson

Professor Kristin Johnson is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Her scholarship and teaching explore regulation and private ordering of capital and credit markets. She is an internationally recognized expert on financial markets regulation and corporate governance, compliance, and risk management. Her recent work examines the implications of emerging innovative technologies including distributed digital ledger technologies that enable the creation of digital assets and intermediaries and artificial intelligence technologies that target commercial and consumer financial transactions, transfers, and assessments.   

Johnson joined the faculty at Emory in 2021 after serving as the McGlinchey Stafford Professor of Law and associate dean for faculty research at Tulane University Law School. While at Tulane, Johnson served as financial market stability program director of the Center for Law and the Economy, an interdisciplinary collaboration among the Murphy Institute, the law school and other university departments exploring the political economy of financial markets regulation. Her research has been published and cited by numerous leading journals, including the William & Mary Law Review, George Washington University Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review Online, Washington Law Review, Journal of Corporate Law, Journal of International and Comparative Law, and the Georgia Law Review. Her forthcoming book the Cambridge University Press Research Handbook on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (with Carla Reyes) examines the ethical implications of integrating artificial intelligence in a just society (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has presented her research at faculty colloquia, workshops, and conferences at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, Duke Law School, and Notre Dame Law School. In 2019, Johnson testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. She has been interviewed as an expert by major media outlets, including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and an affiliate of National Public Radio.

Johnson is an elected member of the American Law Institute and is an American Bar Association Fellow. She has served as a visiting professor at the University of California-Irvine, University of Florida, University of Illinois, and Washington & Lee University law schools.

She served as assistant general counsel and vice president at JP Morgan and as corporate associate at Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett LLP’s New York and London offices. She clerked for the Honorable Joseph A. Greenaway Jr., then of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, elevated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Education: JD, The University of Michigan Law School; BS, Georgetown University Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service