Emilie K. Aguirre
Associate Professor of Law

Emilie Aguirre is a business law scholar whose research focuses on companies pursuing both social purpose and profit. She joined the faculty of Duke Law School in June 2021.

In May 2021, Professor Aguirre received a Ph.D in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Her dissertation, “Pairing Purpose and Profit,” was based on empirical research with 14 companies, and she continues to do field work at two sites, one a tech startup and the other a large multinational corporation. Her previous scholarship has been published in the U.C. Davis Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Journal of Food Law & Policy, as well as the peer-reviewed Handbook of Business Sustainability, British Medical Journal, Food & Drug Law Journal, and Global Health Governance.

Professor Aguirre was previously the Earl B. Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, where she taught and conducted research at the intersection of business law, management, and health and food systems. She has also been an Academic Fellow at the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and a Fulbright scholar and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Aguirre holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and Harvard International Law Journal. She also received an LLM from the University of Cambridge, and an AB, summa cum laude, from Princeton University.

During law school, Professor Aguirre worked in privacy law at Microsoft and in mergers and acquisitions and antitrust law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz. Before law school, she worked for an education and health nonprofit in the Dominican Republic as a Princeton in Latin America Fellow.

A photo of Emillie Aguirre

Recent Courses

Governing Faculty