Zephyr Teachout

Senior Fellow, Open Markets

Zephyr Teachout is a Senior Fellow in New America's Open Markets Program and an Associate Law Professor at Fordham Law School. She writes about political law, with a focus on corruption: her book Corruption in America (Harvard University Press) was published this fall. She is also known for her innovative work as Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential Campaign, where she led the first technical team developing social media tools for supporters, many of which were used in Obama's 2008 online campaign. As the first National Director of the Sunlight Foundation, she led several crowd-sourced investigative journalism projects, including a national campaign to expose the political connections behind earmarks. She started her career as a death penalty lawyer in North Carolina. She has a JD and an MA in Political Science from Duke, and a BA in English from Yale. As a MERI fellow, she worked on developing frameworks to understand the the role of monopolistic companies in American political ecosystem.