Professor Kaufman joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1965. Since then he has taught in the fields of the legal profession, judicial ethics, constitutional law, and commercial law. His biography of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo was published by Harvard University Press in 1998. He has published, lectured and consulted on a variety of subjects in the legal profession field and is the co-author (with David Wilkins) of Problems in Professional Responsibility (5th ed. 2009).

He has been chair of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics since 1982. He has served on many committees appointed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In particular, he has been a member of that court’s Standing Committee on the Rules of Professional Conduct since 1995. He also served for fourteen years on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and was a member of the committees that redrafted the Massachusetts Code of Judicial Conduct and the Rules of Professional Conduct. In 2000, Professor Kaufman was awarded the American Bar Association’s Michael B. Franck Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Professional Responsibility.

Professor Kaufman is currently the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law. He served as Associate Dean of Harvard Law School between 1986 and 1989 and as Vice Dean for Academics between 2005 and 2013.

Professor Kaufman is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he served as President of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard Law School, he served as law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court of the United States for two years and also practiced law as a partner in the firm of Kaufman, Kaufman & Kaufman in Newark, New Jersey.

Professor Kaufman was a charter Senior Fellow of the Ethics Center, one of a group of distinguished Harvard faculty members supporting, in 1986, the idea of an ethics initiative at the University.