CONFERENCES & EVENTS

Corruption and Power at the Top

September 4, 2025
7:30 p.m.–9:00 p.m. ET
WEBINAR

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Register to hear panelists Zephyr Teachout and Roger Berkowitz discuss what can be done to restore trust in government when corruption presents a challenge to the foundation of democratic governance. This event is organized by the Network for Responsible Public Policy.

SPEAKERS

ZEPHYR TEACHOUT is a Professor of Law at Fordham Law School where she focuses on the intersection of corporate power and political power. She teaches corporations, election law, antitrust, and prosecuting white collar crime. Her most recent book, Break ’em Up (2020), makes a case for reimagining the relationship between democracy and antimonopoly law. Her prior book, Corruption in America (2014), argued that the American constitutional system has an embedded anti-corruption principle that has been discarded by the modern Court. Her public writings have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, The Nation and The New Republic. In 2021, she took a leave to work as Special Advisor and Senior Counsel for Economic Justice at the New York Attorney General’s Office. Before Law School, Zephyr Teachout had a career as a digital consultant and nonprofit entrepreneur, and represented clients on death row in North Carolina. She was a Law Clerk to then-Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

MODERATOR

ROGER BERKOWITZ is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz authored The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). Berkowitz is editor of The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition (forthcoming 2020) and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.

EVENT CO-SPONSORS

Network for Responsible Public Policy
The Academy of Political Science
The Puffin Foundation
The McCourtney Institute for Democracy