Adam Benforado’s principal interests include law and mind sciences, corporate law
and contract law.
Professor Benforado received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and was a Frank Knox Fellow
and Visiting Scholar with the Cambridge University Faculty of Law. He clerked for Judge
Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In private practice, Professor Benforado worked for the London office of Latham &
Watkins LLP, where he was involved in international transactional work. Most recently,
Professor Benforado was an associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C., where
he handled trial and appellate litigation matters in a diverse range of substantive
fields including telecommunications, international antitrust and commercial contract
disputes. He also represented clients in pro bono cases involving constitutional law,
family law and criminal law.
Professor Benforado’s scholarship involves applying the lessons of social psychology and
related fields to law and legal theory. In large part, his work is focused on uncovering
how our legal system may reflect certain biases, knowledge structures, motives, affective
cues and other aspects of our cognitive frameworks and processes, and, as a consequence,
how the law may fail to align with our purported values and fail to meet our needs. He is
particularly interested in how corporations and other powerful entities exploit
psychological proclivities to advance their agendas directly and through the legal
system.
His most recent series of articles (with J. Hanson of Harvard Law School)—“The Great
Attributional Divide: How Legal Policy Debates Are Shaped by Divergent Views of Human
Nature,” “Naïve Cynicism: Maintaining False Perceptions in Policy Debates” and “Legal
Academic Backlash: The Response of Legal Theorists to Situationist Insights”—appear in
three volumes of the Emory Law Journal.
Professor Benforado’s opinion articles have appeared in publications including the
Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Houston Chronicle and Boston Review. He is also a
contributor to “The Situationist,” the blog of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at
Harvard Law School.
