James Kwak is a writer, scholar, businessperson, and musician. Most recently, he was one of the “external experts” brought into the Office of Federal Student Aid in the U.S. Department of Education to work on the 2025-2026 Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Until 2022, he was the Jesse Root Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He has been a member of the board of directors of the Southern Center of Human Rights since 2013, was the chairperson of the board from 2019 to 2022, and is currently the treasurer.

James is the author or co-author of five books. He wrote the first two with Simon Johnson, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (2010), a New York Times bestseller; and White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You (2012), a Wall Street Journal business bestseller. His next books were Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality (2017), and Take Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy (2019). Most recently, he collaborated with legendary death penalty attorney Stephen B. Bright on The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts (2023).

James has published academic papers in a wide range of fields including retirement savings, social insurance, regulatory capture, corporate law, and the taxation of capital income. He was a co-author of The Baseline Scenario, for several years a leading blog covering economics and public policy. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Democracy, The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Finance and Development, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, and on the websites of The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, NPR, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times.

James served as a volunteer policy consultant for the 2022 Stacey Abrams gubernatorial campaign. In 2001, he co-founded Guidewire Software. Prior to Guidewire, he worked at McKinsey and Company and Ariba. James has an A.B. in social studies from Harvard, a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School.

James attended the Preparatory Division of the Juilliard School. He was principal cellist and later music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Bach Society Orchestra and principal cellist of the UC Berkeley Symphony. He often plays cello in the New England Repertory Orchestra, the Worcester Symphony Orchestra, and the Wagner in Vermont Festival.