American lawyer
John C. Coffee Jr. (born November 15, 1944) is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School.
Education
Coffee grew up in Manhasset, New York. He is of Irish descent. He attended Manhasset High School where he was in the National Honor Society. After graduation, he attended Amherst College with his high school friend and classmate, actor Ken Howard. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1966, his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1969 and later an LL.M. (in taxation) from New York University School of Law.[1]
Career
Following graduation from law school, Coffee was a Reginald Heber Smith fellow for one year, doing poverty law litigation in New York City. He entered private practice as an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore from 1970 to 1976. He has also served as Reporter for the American Bar Association for its Model Standards on Sentencing Alternatives and Procedures and for the American Law Institute's Principles of Corporate Governance. From 1976 to 1980, he was a professor at Georgetown University Law Center before coming to Columbia. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2001), Stanford University Law School (1988), the University of Virginia Law School (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School (1979).
Coffee has been listed by the National Law Journal as one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States." He is often quoted by The New York Times,[2] The Wall Street Journal[3] and other major media outlets, such as Fox News and CNN, in their corporate and securities reporting. He has also written one of the best known casebooks on U.S. securities regulation, as well as another on corporations. He is considered one of the foremost legal scholars in that area of securities law. Professor Coffee is the most cited law professor in law reviews in the combined corporate, commercial, and business law field.[4]
Personal
Coffee lives in New Jersey. His wife, Jane, who was a professor of Mathematics at the College of Staten Island, died in 2022. [5] [6] They have one daughter, who is a physician.
On August 10, 2011, Coffee was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.[7]
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