People
John Coates
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Millions of Fund Investors Are Getting a Voice
February 23, 2024
Index fund investing has swept the world. In December, for the first time, U.S. investors entrusted more money to index funds than actively managed funds,…
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Harvard law professor on Elon Musk: ‘Over the past 100 years, Delaware has periodically irritated one or two executives by enforcing the law’
February 16, 2024
The legal corporate governance community is unmoved by Elon Musk’s call for companies to dump Delaware as their home state after his historic $55.8 billion…
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Biden’s top financial cop faces showdown with Wall Street
February 2, 2024
Wall Street is at war with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, and the battlefield is the federal courts. Financial and business groups are…
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Holger Spamann, the Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law at Harvard, has been named a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).
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Outsized Control and Outsized Risk
December 20, 2023
A few financial firms now own a significant portion of the American economy, to their peril and the peril of our democracy, argues John Coates.
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On the bookshelves, fall 2023
December 15, 2023
Harvard Law Today features a selection of the books showcased at campus events throughout the fall semester.
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The Stock Market Is Disappearing
October 30, 2023
The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown…
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California’s gift to Gensler’s SEC
September 27, 2023
California played its hand on compelling companies to come clean on carbon emissions. Now it’s up to the Securities and Exchange Commission to decide whether…
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Are Index Funds Making the Economy Less Fair?
September 12, 2023
Bit by bit, financial interests concentrated again. In the 21st century, the old trusts appear to be back, but in different garb. It’s a far…
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The ‘Problem of Twelve’ — redux
August 24, 2023
Last summer Alphaville wrote a list of the dozen most powerful people of the investment world, inspired by a paper written by Harvard University’s John…
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In "The Problem of Twelve," John Coates argues that a small number of large financial institutions increasingly pose a threat to American democracy and to themselves.
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Are index funds getting too powerful?
August 7, 2023
Index funds are a very popular way of investing across the stock market. “The top four index funds alone – State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock and…
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Summer 2023 Harvard Law faculty reading recommendations
June 13, 2023
Looking for a summer book recommendation? Check out what these members of the Harvard Law School faculty plan to read — and listen to — this summer.
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Why the Right Invented a Conservative Right to Post
December 9, 2022
Early december might have marked the first time anyone ever asserted a First Amendment right to see the president’s son’s penis, an argument that the…
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The INDEX Act: A challenge to the voting influence of institutional investors that may yield unintended consequences
November 4, 2022
The Act’s supporters say it would shift voting power from large investment advisers to individual investors, but the reality could be far more complex. In…
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Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., coffee shop with…
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VC Law: Episode 7: Discussing M&A Deals with John Coates
October 14, 2022
Host Gary J. Ross discusses mergers and acquisitions with John Coates, Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, former partner at Wachtell Lipton,…
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SEC Struggles to Stem Staff Losses as Disclosure Workload Grows
October 4, 2022
The SEC is down dozens of officials to scrutinize and regulate companies’ climate disclosures and other corporate reporting, as they grapple with a years-old staff…