Roberto Tallarita S.J.D. ’23, a lecturer on law and the associate director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, has been named an assistant professor of law at Harvard, effective July 1.
A specialist in corporate law and governance, Tallarita focuses his current research on the social and political dimensions of the public corporation. In particular, he has written on index fund environmental stewardship, shareholder activism on social, environmental, and political issues, stakeholder governance, corporate political spending, and CEO political preferences.
“Roberto Tallarita’s important scholarship on corporations has already cast valuable light on the dynamics of corporate governance and the institutional incentives that drive business decision making,” said John F. Manning ’85, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean of Harvard Law School. “His research and teaching will greatly enrich the Harvard Law School community, and I am delighted to welcome him to the HLS faculty.”
Tallarita’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in several leading journals, including the Business Lawyer, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Business Law Review, Journal of Corporation Law, Journal of Legal Analysis, Southern California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online, and Yale Journal on Regulation.
His article, “The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance,” co-authored with Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, was selected by the Corporate Practice Commentator as one of the ten best corporate and securities law articles of 2021. He has made other important contributions to the study of stakeholder governance, including “Stakeholder Capitalism in the Time of Covid,” (February 2020), and “For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain” (August 2020), both co-authored with Bebchuk and Kobi Kastiel LL.M. ’08 S.J.D. ’16.
“I’m extremely honored to join this amazing group of scholars and teachers as a full-time faculty member,” said Tallarita. “I couldn’t have wished for a better scholarly home.”
Since 2018, Tallarita has also served as the Terence M. Considine Senior Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard.
His article Stockholder Politics, published in Hastings Law Journal in 2022, earned the 2021 Brudney Prize for Best Paper in Corporate Governance. He was a co-winner of Best Paper Prize at the 2021-2022 Bocconi-Oxford Junior Scholar Workshop for his article “The Limits of Portfolio Primacy,” which is published in the Vanderbilt Law Review. He also won the Olin Prize for Best Paper in Law and Economics.
He has also published articles in The Atlantic and the Boston Review, and his research has been featured in national media, including in Bloomberg Opinion, the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Prior to joining Harvard, Tallarita spent more than a decade in private practice, working on transnational corporate deals at leading law firms in Europe and the United States.
From 2012 to 2017, he was a partner at LMS, a leading Italian law firm in Milan. He also served as a member of the firm’s executive committee, and as director of its Continuing Legal Education Program. Earlier in his career, he was an associate in the corporate and M&A group of Kirkland & Ellis in New York.
Tallarita earned his first law degree, summa cum laude, at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. This year, he is completing his doctorate, S.J.D., at Harvard with a dissertation on the role of institutional investors in corporate policies on social and environmental issues.
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