Zephyr Teachout
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Zephyr Rain Teachout is a visiting assistant law professor at Duke University. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. The daughter of Peter Teachout, constitutional law professor at Vermont Law School, and the Hon. Mary Miles Teachout, a judge on Vermont's Superior Court, Zephyr is a graduate of Yale University and Duke Law School, where she was the editor-in-chief of the Duke Law Journal. She also holds a master's degree in political science.
She co-founded and was the executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative, which supports attorneys working on death penalty cases. She was the founder and executive director of Baobabs College Labs, a project of Music for America.
After the Dean campaign, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center.
She is a leading advocate of using the Internet for to create local offline groups with political power. Her writings include America Offline, an Open Letter to the DNC [1] Come Together, Right Now: The Unlit Fuse [2], CB's, Meetups and Virtual Volunteers [3], and Constitutional Limits on the Extraterritorial Reach of the Offenses Clause [4].
In January 2005, Teachout sparked controversy by claiming that the Dean campaign had paid two popular webloggers, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, to ensure positive coverage on their sites.
In 2005-2006, Teachout taught political science at the University of Vermont where she was famous for making her students draw maps from memory, which would always end up as circles with names. She claimed that since there were fewer than 200 countries in the world, being held responsible for them on a final exam was fair game. The made-up country of Bostonia was born in her "Introduction to International Relations" course.
In November 2005, she put an end to rumors that she was considering a run for Vermont's at-large congressional seat,[5] which was vacated by Bernie Sanders during his successful 2006 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In 2006, Teachout joined the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director.
In 2007, Teachout joined the faculty of the Duke University School of Law as Visiting Assistant Professor. She plans to teach a course in Election Law in Spring of 2008.
Some of her selected publications include "Mousepads, Shoeleather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics"(Editor) (forthcoming August 2007, Paradigm Publishers); "How Politicians can use Distributive Networks" (New Assignment, November 2006); "Youtube? It's so Yesterday," (with Tim Wu) (Washington Post, November 2006), and "Powering Up Internet Campaigns," book chapter in Lets Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.
