Skip to main content

Penn Law faculty, Law Review top best corporate and securities articles list

May 02, 2019

Penn Law once again dominated the Corporate Practice Commentator’s annual list of the top ten list articles on corporate and securities law, as the only law school with three faculty members represented and two articles featured.

Penn Law once again dominated the Corporate Practice Commentator’s annual list of the top ten list articles on corporate and securities law, as the only law school with three faculty members represented and two articles featured.

Jill E. Fisch, Jonah B. Gelbach, and Jonathan Klick were among the faculty whose research was recognized. Fisch placed two articles on the top ten list, the only scholar nationally to do so. Cathy Hwang of the University of Utah, who appears on the list for her UCLA Law Review article “Deal Momentum,” will teach Corporations at Penn Law as a Visiting Professor in 2020.

Additionally, in a first for any law journal in the 25-year history of the list, and independently of our own faculty’s articles, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review published three of the articles in the top ten. The Law Review is also the only journal with more than one placement on this year’s list. The ten articles were selected as the best of nearly 400 works of scholarship published in 2018, based on a poll of corporate and securities law teachers from around the country.

“Penn Law’s faculty has long been a leader in this field, and continues to produce groundbreaking and insightful scholarship in the field of business law,” said Ted Ruger, Penn Law’s Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law. “This accomplishment is just one example of our professors’ impressive expertise and impact on the most significant issues in corporate and securities law today. The fact that our Law Review student editors had the discerning judgment to select and publish three other top articles this year, by scholars from other schools, is further testament to our teaching strength and student sophistication on business law issues.”

The two articles on the list by Penn Law faculty are “Governance by Contract: The Implications for Corporate Bylaws,” authored by Fisch, Penn Law’s Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and Economics, and published in the California Law Review; and “The Logic and Limits of Event Studies in Securities Fraud Litigation,” co-authored by Fisch and Professors of Law Gelbach and Klick and published in the Texas Law Review.

In “Governance by Contract,” Fisch argues for increased judicial scrutiny of board-adopted corporate governance bylaws in light of the imbalance of power between shareholders and boards of directors.

“The Logic and Limits of Event Studies in Securities Fraud Litigation” offers a primer on event studies, which have become increasingly important in securities fraud litigation. Fisch, Gelbach, and Klick go on to examine the limitations of event studies and consider the implications for the role they should play in litigation.

Fisch is an internationally known scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of business and law, including the role of regulation and litigation in addressing limitations in the disciplinary power of the capital markets. Her scholarship has appeared in a variety of publications including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Texas Law Review.

Gelbach’s law teaching and scholarship focus on civil procedure, evidence, statutory interpretation, law and economics, event study methodology, applied statistical methodology, and applied microeconomics. He is currently a Director of the American Law and Economics Association and is co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization.

Klick uses using cutting-edge econometric tools in his work to identify the causal effects of laws and regulations on individual behavior. His scholarship has been published in numerous peer-reviewed economics journals, including theJournal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and the Journal of Legal Studies.