Reinier H. Kraakman

Reinier Kraakman is the Ezra Ripley Thayer Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He was previously Professor of Law at Yale Law School (1981 -1986) and Visiting Professor of Law at both Georgetown University Law Center (1993) and New York University Law School (1996 -1997). He was also a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He currently teaches corporate law, corporate finance, and a seminar devoted to theoretical issues in organizational law. He has been an advisor on company law reform in Russia and Vietnam. He has written numerous articles on topics in corporate law, corporate governance, and liability strategies for controlling corporate behavior. He was elected an ECGI research associate in 2006. His more recent better-known articles include The End of History for Corporate Law (with Henry Hansmann), 89 GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL 439 (2000); The Essential Role of Organizational Law (with Henry Hansmann), 110 YALE LAW JOURNAL 387 (2000); and Russian Privatization and Corporate Governance: What Went Wrong? (with Bernard Black and Anna Tarassova), 52 STANFORD LAW REVIEW 1731 (2000). He is a lead author of a recent treatise on comparative corporate law that is now in its second edition, R. Kraakman, et al., The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach (3rd ed.) (Oxford University Press: 2017), and a co-author of a book of cases and discussion of the law of business organizations, W. Allen, R. Kraakman, and Subramanian, Cases and Commentaries on the Law of Business Organization, (4th Ed. Wolters Kluwer, Aspen Press 2012), and Allen and Kraakman, Cases and Commentaries on the Law of Business Organization, (5th Ed. Wolters Kluwer, Aspen Press 2016). His current areas of research include corporate include the corporate governance of widely-held corporations, ownership structure and corporate governance, the empirical and legal determinants of CEO turnover, comparative corporate law and finance, the bases for individual- and firm- level liability in corporate settings, the meaning and legal implications of price efficiency in capital markets.