Former Commissioner, US CFTC
Kristin Johnson is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Center for Alternative Finance. She served as a Commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission from March 2022 until September 2025. She was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate for her service as a CFTC Commissioner. She was also nominated to serve as the Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the United States Department of the Treasury.
Professor Johnson is an internationally recognized expert on financial markets regulation, corporate governance, compliance, and risk management law and policy with specialization in the regulation of complex financial products including the origination, distribution, and secondary market trading, clearing, and settlement of securities and derivatives. Her academic research and publications examine the development and expansion of innovation in finance including blockchain use cases, cryptocurrency or digital asset markets, and the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence in financial markets.
In 2021, Professor Johnson testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions, at a hearing on Banking Innovation or Regulatory Evasion? Exploring Trends in Financial Institution Charters. In 2019, she testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Task Force on Financial Technology and the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence at a hearing – Examining the Use of Alternative Data – that explored the implications of integrating artificial intelligence in financial technology (fintech) platforms. She has published or received offers to publish legal scholarship in dozens of prestigious law journals. She is the author of the following forthcoming books – Cambridge University Press Handbook on Artificial Intelligence & The Law and Artificial Intelligence & The Law: Cases and Materials.
Prior to joining the Commission, Professor Johnson held endowed professorships at Emory University and Tulane University Law Schools and visiting professorships at prestigious law schools around the nation. She taught courses on the regulation of securities and derivatives markets, financial institutions, including courses on fintech, the development of blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence, as well as corporations and ethical leadership. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an American Bar Foundation Fellow, and former Chair of the Securities Regulation Section and the Executive Committee of the Business Associations and a member of the Executive Committee of the Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services Sections of the Association of American Law Schools.
Prior to public service and law teaching, Professor Johnson served as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, a Vice President and Assistant General Counsel in the Treasury Services Division at JP Morgan, a corporate associate at Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett LLP’s New York and London offices where she represented issuers and underwriters in domestic and international debt and equity offerings, lenders and borrowers in banking and credit matters, and private equity firms and publicly-traded companies in mergers and acquisitions.