John Coates
John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics
Deputy Dean
Research Director, Center on the Legal Profession
John Coates is the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, where he also serves as Deputy Dean and Research Director of the Center on the Legal Profession. Professor Coates served as General Counsel and as Acting Director for the Division of Corporation Finance for the SEC. Before joining Harvard, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, specializing in financial institutions and M&A. At HLS and at HBS, he teaches corporate governance, M&A, finance, and related topics. He has testified before Congress, advised the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the New York Stock Exchange, and served as the Chair of the Investor-as-Owner Subcommittee of the Investor Advisory Committee of the SEC.
Professor Coates’s most recent publication is The Problem of Twelve: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything.
Representative Publications
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Favorite
John C. Coates, Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructuring: Types, Regulation, and Patterns of Practice, in The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance (Jeffrey N. Gordon & Wolf-Georg Ringe eds. 2017). -
Favorite
John C. Coates, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Financial Regulation: Case Studies and Implications, 124 Yale L. J. 882 (2015). - John Coates, The Problem of Twelve: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything (Columbia Glob. Reps. 2023).
- John C. Coates , SPAC Law and Myths, 78 Bus. Law. 371 (2023)
- Considering the Index Fund Voting Process: Hearing Before the S. Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 117th Cong. (2022) (testimony of John C. Coates IV, John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics, Harvard Law School).