Former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun has accepted a position as adjunct professor of management at DePaul University’s College of Commerce and will teach business law to students in the university’s highly ranked MBA program beginning in September.

Moseley Braun, 53, an attorney and former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, Samoa, Antarctica and the Cook Islands, will teach a course titled “Legal Aspects of Business–Total Perspective for the Executive.” The course focuses on corporate governance issues—a subject that is especially important for business students because of recent events in the corporate world, according to Alex Devience, chairman of the Department of Management.

“The debacle that arose from Enron has created a renewed focus on the legal and moral responsibilities of business managers to employees, shareholders and investors,” Devience said. “Based on her academic, legal and public service record, Professor Moseley Braun is highly qualified to teach corporate law and the relevant response of government to the problem.”

“We have been reminded of the devastating real-life impacts of corporate offenses, and we must recommit to producing leaders who better understand and can better fulfill their responsibilities,” Moseley Braun said. “DePaul University has an extraordinary reputation for that kind of commitment, both to its students and to Chicago. I look forward to our collaboration.”

Moseley Braun made history and won national attention in 1992, when she was the first African-American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate and the first woman to serve as a permanent member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee.

As a freshman member, she led legislative charges for low-income housing support, school construction and women’s pension equity. Following her tenure in the Senate, she served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Education, and as U.S. Ambassador from 1999 to 2001.

The daughter of a law enforcement officer and a medical technician, Moseley Braun grew up on Chicago’s South Side and attended public schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1969 and a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1972.

After working in private practice, Moseley Braun became an Assistant United States Attorney, working primarily in the civil and appellate law areas. Her work in housing, health policy and environmental law won her the Attorney General’s Special Achievement Award.

After the birth of her son Matthew, she garnered local attention for her work on a local environmental issue. Urged by her neighbors to run for public office, she won her first election, a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, in 1978.

During a decade in the Illinois House, where she served as assistant majority leader, Moseley Braun built a distinguished legislative record that emphasized public education, government reform and civil rights. In 1988, she was elected Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

A resident of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Moseley Braun now maintains a private business law practice and serves as an independent business consultant. She taught political science and governance as the Mott Distinguished Visiting Professor at Morris Brown College in Atlanta last year and frequently lectures on the subject of leadership. Moseley Braun is one of several prominent professors hired by DePaul’s business school this year. Werner F.M. De Bondt, a pioneer in the behavioral finance discipline, was named behavioral finance chair and director of the newly created Richard H. Driehaus Center in Behavioral Finance in April. The finance department also appointed Diane C. Swonk, Bank One’s nationally recognized chief economist, as clinical professor of finance this spring.