Corey Ciocchetti
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Corey Ciocchetti is a professor in the Department of Business Ethics and Legal Studies at the Daniels College of Business. He has received the Charles Hewitt Master Teacher Award from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award from the University of Denver Alumni Association, and the Scholarship of Teaching Award and the Scholarship of Discovery Award from the Daniels College of Business. Ciocchetti also won the Holmes-Cardozo Award for top conference paper and received the Distinguished Junior Faculty Member award by the Academy of Legal Studies in Business. His articles appear in his discipline’s top journals and have been downloaded more than 33,000 times on Google Scholar and BEPress.
What do you study? What got you interested in the field?
I was a corporate lawyer for a time, and it didn’t suit me. When the teaching opportunity at DU came up, it felt really compelling. I could use a different side of my brain, make a difference in peoples’ lives and feel like I’m doing something good for the world.
I typically teach constitutional law, business law and ethics. Daniels is a unique school to have this confluence of subjects under one department. It’s an interesting intersection because there is almost always something on the front page of the newspaper that addresses all three of these elements. You look at former President Trump’s various court cases, the CEO of Better.com (who fired 900 employees via Zoom) and the recent scandals across business industries and see the synergies with ethics, law and business.
I’m interested in the Constitution and its interaction with business and American society. Specifically, I’m writing right now about federalism: the idea of shared power in which states are sovereign and the federal government is sovereign, and when they conflict the federal government wins via the Supremacy Clause. It’s a slippery slope because both the states and the federal government like to take advantage of it. In the Constitution, the federal government only has a handful of actual enumerated powers, like taxing and raising an army. Everything else is left up to the states. When that balance is in harmony, it works well, but when states and the federal government conflicts, federalism is tested.
How do you bring these ideas into the classroom?
I try very hard to adhere to the teacher-scholar model. The topics that I research are very easily integrated into my teaching. For example, I often bring in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and show the front page to the class. I ask them to identify the legal, ethical and business issues that they see. I can usually do this without even looking at the content of the front page and it works every single time—especially these days as the Supreme Court and business ethics scandals seem always to be front-page news. I realize that this is sort of a sad testament to our times, but it makes for a great teaching tool. Additionally, I can relate these issues to the business setting and ask how businesses can approach their responsibilities to their employees, customers and society.
What are some of the challenges of your work?
A lot of the topics I write about are controversial. We live in difficult times and a lot of people are on edge. But we should not just sit back and ignore hard questions—especially in academia. So, in class, we talk about a person’s obligations as a human being, who may also be a member of the business community. It’s important to look at the whole self and not just the business self. Finally, I write and teach about the “Principle of Charity,” meaning that we are trying to find out what’s right, not who’s right. And when you frame the conversation like that, you eliminate a lot of the fighting. That’s what we should be doing in academia, pushing the boundaries and talking about hard things.
How do you see your work impacting the business community, policymakers or society at large?
I do some public speaking and so I get to take this research directly out into the real world. I talk to business leaders about what it means to be a leader that you would want to follow, a values-based leader so to speak. They are very interested in how ethical frameworks from the long past can still inform their decision making today. I leave them on this note: To paraphrase philosopher Immanuel Kant, if you do not like the way that something is going in your world, you have a moral obligation to help fix it.