Benjamin W. Heineman

Biography

Ben W. Heineman, Jr. was GE’s Senior Vice President-General Counsel from 1987-2003, and then Senior Vice President for Law and Public Affairs from 2004 until his retirement at the end of 2005. He is currently Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession and its Program on Corporate Governance, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has also been a lecturer 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. His new book, The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension, was published in the Spring of 2016 by Ankerwycke, the trade imprint of the American Bar Association. Another recent book, High Performance with High Integrity, was published in June 2008 by the Harvard Business Press. He writes and lectures frequently on business, law, public policy and international affairs. He is also the author of books on British race relations and the American presidency.

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 recipient of the American Lawyer magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award of Corporate Counsel magazine 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 the American Lawyer, one of America’s 100 most influential lawyers by the 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, Central European University and Transparency International-USA. He is a graduate of Harvard College (BA-history), Oxford University (B.Litt—political sociology) and Yale Law School (JD).

Areas of Interest

• Ethics
• Corporate Law
• Constitutional Law