Eric Franklin Amarante
- Legal Clinic
- Nonprofit
Eric Franklin Amarante
Eric Franklin Amarante joined the College of Law in 2017, after teaching at the University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law for four years, where he directed the Small Business and Nonprofit Legal Clinic. Prior to his stint at UNLV, Amarante was the inaugural Whiting Fellow at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s Community Economic Development Clinic.
Amarante’s research concentrates primarily on nonprofit law, with a focus on the regulation of charities. His scholarship earned him the Marilyn V. Yarbrough Faculty Award for Writing Excellence in 2023 and he was named the Wilkinson Junior Research Professor in both 2019 and 2023. In 2019, he was invited to join the 2019-2020 class of Bellow Scholars. His articles have been published by The George Washington Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Washington Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and others.
Amarante is dedicated to serving the College of Law and East Tennessee communities. In addition to his teaching and committee work, he serves as the faculty advisor for the Asian Pacific Islander Law Student Association, the Latino Law Student Association, the Secular Legal Association, and the Tennessee Law Review. Further, Amarante serves on a number of boards of directors, including Adelante, Serving Immigrants, and the Knoxville Latino Bar Association. For his service, Amarante received the Carden Faculty Award for Outstanding Service in 2019 and the Thomas and Elizabeth Fox Faculty Excellence Award for Outstanding Service to the Bench and Bar in 2021.
Amarante received his law degree from Cornell Law School and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After law school, he joined Sullivan & Cromwell’s corporate group in Palo Alto, where his practice primarily focused on mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, and securities offerings. After several years at Sullivan, he moved to Seattle to join the business transaction group of Davis Wright Tremaine, where he worked primarily with early-stage companies.
He and his wife, Arléne, have two dogs, Kiko and Manu.
- Education & Experience
- Publications
J.D., Cornell Law School
B.A., University of Texas
The Absurdity of Criminalizing Encouraging Words, 2022-2023 Cato Supreme Court Review 69 (2023) (invited contribution).
States as Laboratories for Charitable Compliance: An Empirical Study, 90 George Washington Law Review 445 (2022).
Criminalizing Immigrant Entrepreneurs (and Their Lawyers), 61 Boston College Law Review 1323 (2020).
Unregulated Charity, 94 Washington Law Review 1503 (2019).
The Perils of Philanthrocapitalism, 78 Maryland Law Review 1 (2018).
The Unsung Latino Entrepreneurs of Appalachia, 120 West Virginia Law Review 773 (2018) (invited contribution).