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.
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. Dean's Director of Internet Communications, Mathew Gross, who later oversaw blogger outreach for the campaign, disputed Teachout's statements. While Teachout did not suggest Armstrong or Moulitsas knew of the Dean campaign's motives, Armstrong responded to Teachout's claims by pointing out that he ceased blogging while employed by the Dean campaign and that Moulitsas ran a prominent disclaimer on Daily Kos disclosing his capacity as a "technical consultant" to the campaign. [1]
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 taught a course, "The Law of the Political Process" [2] in the 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 (Z. Teachout & T. Streeter, eds.) (Paradigm Publishers, 2007) [3]; "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 Let's Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.
