Richard Painter

Richard W. Painter is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota. He is also a board member and vice chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

From February 2005 to July 2007, he was associate counsel to the president in the White House Counsel’s office, serving as the chief ethics lawyer for the president, White House employees, and senior nominees to Senate-confirmed positions in the executive branch. He was previously a tenured member of the law faculty at the University of Oregon School of Law and the University of Illinois College of Law, where he was the Guy Raymond and Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Professor of Law from 2002 to 2005.

Following law school, he clerked for Judge John T. Noonan Jr. of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and later practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City and Finn Dixon & Herling in Stamford, Conn. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, in history from Harvard University and his J.D. from Yale University, where he was an editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation.