Benjamin W. Heineman Jr.

Ben W. Heineman Jr. was GE’s senior vice president–general counsel from 1987 to 2003 and then senior vice president for law and public affairs from 2004 until his retirement at the end of 2005. He is currently a senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession and Program on Corporate Governance, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a lecturer in law at Yale Law School. A Rhodes scholar, editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Mr. Heineman was assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and practiced public interest law and constitutional law prior to his service at GE. He is the author of High Performance with High Integrity (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and The Inside Counsel Revolution (American Bar Association, forthcoming), as well as books on British race relations and the American presidency. He writes and lectures frequently on business, law, public policy, and international affairs. He is a graduate of Harvard College (B.A. with high honors in history), Oxford University (B.Litt. in political sociology), and Yale Law School (J.D.). He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. He is a recipient of the American Lawyer’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award of Board Member magazine. He was named one of the top 50 Innovators in Law in the Past 50 Years by American Lawyer, one of America’s 100 most influential lawyers by National Law Journal, one of the 100 most influential individuals on business ethics by Ethisphere magazine, and one of the 100 most influential people in corporate governance by the National Association of Corporate Directors. He serves on the boards of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Transparency International-USA, and Central European University.