Professor Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield is Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School, Greenfield is the author of three trade books — most recently Corporations are People Too (And They Should Act Like It) for Yale University Press — and two online casebooks for courses in constitutional law. He is currently the chief editor and principal author of the two Supreme Court volumes of Moore’s Federal Practice. Greenfield has published articles in leading legal journals including the Yale Law Journal, The Supreme Court Review, and the Virginia Law Review. Greenfield clerked for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court and practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC.

Greenfield is a frequent public commentator on local, national, and international news programs, having appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Fox. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USAToday, Slate, SCOTUSBlog, the Boston Globe, the American Prospect, Salon, and the Nation. Greenfield has lectured at 139 institutions in 44 states and eleven countries, and has been the recipient of four teaching awards while at Boston College. He is admitted to practice before the Supreme Court and is a member of the District of Columbia bar. 

He is also an active participant in various litigation matters pertaining to civil rights and corporate accountability. He was the Founder and President of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), the named plaintiff in a 2006 Supreme Court case challenging the Pentagon’s anti-gay policies; he was instrumental in developing the theory of the cases brought against Unocal Corporation and Hershey Corporations for alleged human rights violations in Burma and West Africa; he co-authored amicus briefs in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative v Elenis arguing that the Supreme Court should not extend religious freedom rights to for-profit corporations. He is also an avid hiker, having “bagged” all forty-eight 4000-footers in New Hampshire with his son Liam and dog Murphy.