Kathleen Clark practices law in Washington, DC, where she has lived off and on since the 1980s. She came by her interest in ethics and whistleblowing early, growing up in a family where dinnertime discussions tended toward politics, civil rights and social justice.
Her government experience includes advising the Attorney General of the District of Columbia on transparency and anti-corruption reforms, writing a report on government contractor ethics for the Administrative Conference of the United States, advising the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman on issues of white-collar crime, and clerking for U.S District Court Judge Harold H. Greene.
Clark serves on the D.C. Bar’s Global Legal Practice Committee, and is a board member of American Oversight. She previously served on the boards of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization, the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and was a member of the D.C. Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee.
She is on the law faculty of Washington University, where she was named the John S. Lehman Research Professor and Israel Treiman Faculty Fellow. She has also taught at the University of Michigan, Cornell University, Utrecht University and the University of Economics and Law in Vietnam. She previously served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Sections on Professional Responsibility, Legislation and National Security.
Clark has written extensively on ethics and corruption in academic journals and the popular press, and her writings have been cited in hundreds of books and articles. Her legal analysis is regularly cited in the media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, New Yorker, Time, and Associated Press. She has also provided legal analysis on television and radio, including PBS, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and NPR.
She graduated cum laude from Yale College with a B.A. in Physics & Philosophy; studied Russian in the Soviet Union and Spanish in Guatemala; and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School.