Professor Jeffrey Gordon

Jeffrey N. Gordon

  • Richard Paul Richman Professor of Law
Education

J.D., Harvard University, 1975
B.A., Yale University, 1971

Areas of Specialty

Corporations
Mergers and Acquisitions
Financial Regulation
Foundations of the Regulatory State

The co-director of Columbia Law School’s Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, Jeffrey N. Gordon teaches and writes extensively on corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, comparative corporate governance, and the regulation of financial institutions.  He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance (2018) and co-author of Principles of Financial Regulation (2016), which addresses the challenges facing regulators of financial institutions and markets in an interconnected and evolving global financial system.  His current work focuses on the law and political economy of current corporate governance arrangements.  In that regard he has been a participant in the British Academy project on the Future of the Corporation, publishing "Is Corporate Governance a First Order Cause of the Current Malaise?"  

Gordon also serves as co-director of the interdisciplinary Columbia Center for Law and Economic Studies and of the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy, a joint program of the Columbia Law and Business Schools. He is also a longtime fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), the international, scientific, nonprofit association where academics, legislators, and practitioners debate major corporate governance issues.

Gordon joined the Columbia Law faculty in 1988, after six years as a professor at the NYU School of Law. Before becoming an academic, Gordon was a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, an associate at a corporate firm in New York, and an attorney for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. In addition to teaching at Columbia, Gordon is a visiting professor on the faculty of law at the University of Oxford.

Publications

  • “Principles of Financial Regulation,” co-authored with John Armour, Dan Awrey, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Colin Mayer, and Jennifer Payne (Oxford Univ. Press 2016)
  • “Oxford Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance,” co-editor with W. Georg Ringe (Oxford Univ. Press forthcoming 2016)
  • “Bank Resolution in the European Banking Union: An American Perspective on What it Would Take,” (with Georg Ringe), 115 Colum. L. Rev. 1297 (2015)
  • “Systemic Harms and Shareholder Value,” (with John Armour), 6 Journal of Legal Analysis 35 (2014)
  • “The Empty Call for Benefit Cost Analysis in Financial Regulation,” 43 Journal of Legal Studies S351 (2014)
  • “Money Market Funds Run Risk: Will Floating Net Asset Value Fix the Problem?” (with Christopher M. Gandia), Columbia Business Law Review 314 (2014)
  • “The Agency Costs of Agency Capitalism: Activist Investors and the Revaluation of Governance Rights,” (with Ronald Gilson), 113 Columbia Law Review 863 (2013)

Honors and Awards

ECGU’s Egon Zehnder Prize for best paper on company boards and their role in corporate governance

2007