Corporate Governance Expert Joins Columbia Law School Faculty

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Corporate Governance Expert Joins Columbia Law School Faculty

 


Media contact: Sonia von Gutfeld, 212-854-1453, [email protected]
Public Affairs Office, 212-854-2650, [email protected]
 
New York, May 12, 2009 — Robert J. Jackson Jr., an expert in corporate law and executive compensation, will join the Columbia Law School faculty in July 2010 as associate professor after spending the 2009-10 academic year in Washington, D.C., advising the Treasury Department.
 
“Robert Jackson is an important voice on issues that are vital to our economic future. We are very proud that he will serve in government before joining our faculty,” said David M. Schizer, Dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law.
 
While advising the Treasury, Jackson will work with Columbia Law School alumnus George Madison ’80, the Treasury’s General Counsel-designate and advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
 
Jackson is an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, working in the firm’s Executive Compensation and Benefits Department. His latest work provides the first comprehensive study of CEO pay in firms owned by private equity. Using data disclosed when private equity owners move to take their companies public, Jackson compares the way these firms pay top executives with CEO pay in U.S. public companies. His work reveals that, although the amounts paid to CEOs in each type of firm are similar, private equity owners link CEO pay far more closely to performance than public company boards of directors. The project also provides provocative new evidence on the compensation received by CEOs in connection with private equity buyouts.
 
Jackson’s previous work on executive compensation has been widely referenced in the financial press and has been the subject of rulemaking commentary before the Securities and Exchange Commission. His research, which emphasizes the empirical study of corporate governance questions, is motivated by insights and analytical methods derived from these experiences and offers new perspective on the academic debate on executive compensation, as well as policy prescriptions for corporate and securities law. His principal areas of interest include corporate law, corporate finance, securities regulation and contracts.
 
His publications include:
  • A New Model of Administrative Enforcement, 93 VA. L. REV. 1983 (2007) (with David Rosenberg);
     
  • Executive Pensions, 30 J. CORP. L. 823 (2005) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk) (noted in the New York Times, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal);
     
  • Note, Rethinking Retroactivity, 118 HARV. L. REV. 1642 (2005); and
     
  • Nine Justices, Ten Years: A Statistical Retrospective, 118 HARV. L. REV. 510 (2005).
Jackson developed his current project while a Research Fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, where he served as Editor of the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation. Jackson received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an M.A. in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in 2005. In 2000, he received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School. Jackson earned a B.A. in politics, philosophy and economics, as well as a B.S. in economics, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, after studying at Pembroke College at Oxford University.
 
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