William E. Kovacic

William E. Kovacic is currently a professor of Global Competition Law and Policy and director of the Competition Law Center at the George Washington University. Since 2013, Professor Kovacic has served as a Non-executive Director of the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

He was a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from January 2006 to October 2011 and served as Chairman of the FTC from March 2008 until March 2009. Previously, Professor Kovacic was the FTC’s General Counsel from 2001 through 2004. He also worked for the Commission from 1979 until 1983, initially as a staff attorney in the Bureau of Competition’s Planning Office and later as an attorney advisor to former Commissioner George W. Douglas.

Before he became a Commissioner, Kovacic was the E.K. Gubin Professor of Government Contracts Law at George Washington University Law School, where he began teaching in 1999. He had taught at the George Mason University School of Law since 1986, after practicing antitrust and government contracts law for three years at Bryan Cave’s Washington, DC, office.

Earlier in his career, Prof. Kovacic spent one year on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee. Since 1992, Prof. Kovacic has been an adviser on antitrust and consumer protection issues to the governments of Armenia, Benin, Egypt, El Salvador, Georgia, Guyana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Panama, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Kovacic graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1974, and received his J.D. from Columbia University in 1978.