Afra Afsharipour

Afra Afsharipour is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at University of California, Davis School of Law. She served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2018 to 2024. She researches in the areas of comparative corporate law, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, and transactional law. She has taught courses in business associations, mergers and acquisitions, startups and venture capital, and antitrust. Her scholarship has appeared in several books and law reviews, including Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Georgia Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, National Law School of India Review, and other leading journals. She is co-editor of Comparative Corporate Governance (eds. Afra Afsharipour & Martin Gelter, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2021). She authored the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India: Legal Standards and Board Practices (The Conference Board 2016) and co-authored the 2021 edition of the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India: Legal Standards and Board Practices (The Conference Board 2021). Her articles have been selected by scholars in the field as among the Top Ten Best Corporate and Securities Articles in their respective years, most recently in 2024 for “Gender and the Social Structure of Exclusion in U.S. Corporate Law” (University of Chicago Law Review).

Professor Afsharipour has delivered numerous talks, nationally and internationally, and has been a visiting scholar in India, China and Taiwan. She is quoted regularly by leading national and international news outlets, and her research has been featured in the New York Times and the American Lawyer, as well as other national news outlets.

She is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI), widely considered the nation’s preeminent law reform organization. In 2023, she was named a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. In 2019 she was named a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools and the American Society of Comparative Law and serves on the board of the National Business Law Scholars Conference. In 2018 she was honored by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) with the Section on Business Associations Outstanding Mentor Award. In 2014 she was selected for the Lawyers of Color’s 50 Under 50 list, a comprehensive catalog of minority law professors making an impact in legal education.

Prior to joining the Davis faculty, Professor Afsharipour was an attorney at the international law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. There she advised clients on domestic and cross border mergers and acquisitions, public and private securities offerings, and corporate governance and compliance matters. She served as a law clerk for Judge Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Professor Afsharipour received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and served as an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a submissions editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. She received her B.A. (magna cum laude) from Cornell University.