Professor Jeff Schwartz, an expert in securities law, was recognized for the paper “Corporate Democracy and the Intermediary Voting Dilemma” (102 Tex. L. Rev. 1 (2023)), written with Professor Jill E. Fisch of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The paper was named one of the top 10 articles in corporate and securities law in 2023 from a list of about 400 by the Corporate Practice Commentator.
Schwartz and Fisch’s article also won the award for best paper from the Berkeley Center for Law and Business and has been presented at New York University, Columbia, and Berkeley.
“Most people don’t realize that some of the most important issues in society, like the extent to which corporations change their behavior to address climate change, are guided by a few financial institutions, which own substantial interests in the largest U.S. companies,” Schwartz says. “This paper proposes a way to shift power away from these financial institutions and to the investors whose interests they are duty-bound to represent.”
Schwartz says he was very excited to receive this recognition.
“What’s more exciting is that the paper has influenced how people think about how corporate governance should work in this new era where institutions are so powerful,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in how the way that we regulate corporations and investing impact broader societal issues, like wealth inequality, climate change, and efforts to diversify the workforce.”
Read Schwartz’s article: and a Harvard blog post about it.