Eric Orts: Guardsmark Endowed Professor

Professor Eric Orts has been named the Guardsmark Endowed Professor at the Wharton School. He is a full professor in the legal studies and management departments. He also directs Wharton's Environmental Management Program and serves as an academic co-director of the NASD Institute at Wharton Certificate Program for Compliance and Regulatory Professionals. His primary research and teaching interests are in topics relating to corporate and environmental law, policy, and management.

Prior to joining Wharton's faculty in 1991, Professor Orts practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison in New York City and was the Chemical Bank fellow in corporate social responsibility at Columbia Law School. During his Wharton tenure, he visited as a Fulbright professor in the law department of the University of Leuven in Belgium and as the Freeman Foundation Visiting Professor in the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in China. In 2002-03 he served as the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University and also as a faculty fellow in the Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School.

Professor Orts is a graduate of Oberlin College, where he received his B.A. with honors in government in 1982, the New School for Social Research, where he received an M.A. in political science in 1985, the University of Michigan Law School, J.D. cum laude, 1988, and Columbia University School of Law, J.S.D. in 1984.

He is a member of the bar of New York and the District of Columbia and is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

At Wharton, he teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in corporate law and governance, environmental management and policy, introduction to law, and professional ethics.

The Guardsmark Endowed Professorship was established with a gift from Wharton Overseer Ira A. Lipman, chairman and president of Guardsmark, Inc. Mr. Lipman founded Guardsmark, a privately held security services company, in 1963. Currently, Guardsmark operates more than 145 branch offices in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico and serves organizations in more than 400 cities. Guardsmark is one of the world's largest security service companies. Guardsmark and Mr. Lipman have also been recipients of recent awards for high achievement in business ethics and corporate citizenship.