Sarath Sanga

Sarath Sanga is a professor of law and co-director of the Center for the Study of Corporate Law at Yale Law School. He teaches contracts and corporate law, as well as a law and economics course at Yale College. Prior to joining Yale, he held permanent and visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Sanga specializes in contracts and governance: how people and organizations structure their relationships and set their own rules. His research has explored how shareholder agreements are reshaping corporate governance, demonstrating how the subtle design of corporate altering rules¹ can fundamentally shift power and control of corporations. He also investigated the logic behind venture-capital contracts², showing how these documents solve (or exacerbate) complex fiduciary conflicts in startups. Another strand of his research examines how firms select governing laws for their contracts³ and their corporations⁴, and why some states — like Delaware and New York — dominate the landscape through powerful network effects.

His work also addresses how contracts strategically omit terms to achieve outcomes that explicit terms can't⁵. For example, companies craft intentionally incomplete employment agreements to enforce noncompete clauses precisely where the law forbids them. He proposed fresh regulatory strategies to rebalance state, federal, and individual interests in arbitration⁶.

His research also examines broader legal institutions: revealing the troubling rise in domestic violence during COVID-19 lockdowns⁷, how police treat motorists⁸, how officer race affects policing outcomes⁹, and the impact of affirmative action bans¹⁰. He has also studied the legal profession itself, including how occupational licensing rules reduce labor market mobility among lawyers¹¹ and the rise of women in law schools¹².

He co-founded SCALES¹³, a project harnessing AI and natural language processing to make federal court records freely accessible¹⁴ whose mission is to combat the legal system’s costly and senseless barriers¹⁵ to public access to court records.