Reynolds Holding Appointed Editor-at-Large of Blog on Corporations and Capital Markets

Veteran journalist Reynolds Holding has joined Columbia Law School as a senior fellow and editor-at-large of The CLS Blue Sky Blog on corporate governance, financial regulation, the capital markets, M&A and white-collar crime.

Holding most recently was at Reuters, where he served as the law editor and a columnist for Breakingviews, the global news organization’s financial commentary arm. At the Law School he will work with Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law John C. Coffee Jr. and other members of the blog’s editorial board: Professor Robert Jackson, Professor Kathryn Judge and Edward F. Greene, a lecturer in law and partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. 

Launched in Jan. 2013 as the brainchild of Coffee, the CLS Blue Sky Blog’s name derives from the title given to state securities laws, which are known as “blue sky laws.”  The blog's moniker is meant to broadly evoke the history of all securities laws, the spirit of transparency (as memorialized in Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous quote, “… sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants …”), and the possibility of more speculative, free-ranging discussion that is not confined by the specific concerns of clients.

“We were very lucky to be able to attract Reynolds. Not only is he a first-rate journalist with extraordinary credentials and legal experience, but he is the person who can take the CLS Blue Sky Blog into the digital era and find ways to integrate us with social media and the visual medium,” said Coffee, director of the Law School’s Center on Corporate Governance.

In his new role, Holding will guide and expand the Blue Sky Blog as a voice for the Law School in the corporate, academic and public policy worlds. His extensive experience as a writer, editor and lawyer will strengthen the site’s offerings of articles, legal memoranda, policy papers, videos, and other content. 

Holding began his career as a lawyer with the New York firm of Debevoise & Plimpton after graduating from Duke Law School and Harvard College. He was an investigative reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory writing in 1999. He was the executive editor of Legal Affairs magazine, a senior writer at Time magazine, and a national editorial producer for the Law & Justice Unit at ABC News. 

Posted September 2016