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Douglas G. Baird to Deliver Winter Lecture on April 6

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Douglas G. Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and the Chair of the National Bankruptcy Conference, will deliver the Judge Ralph K. Winter Lecture on Corporate Law and Governance. The lecture, titled “Two Stories of Corporate Governance,” will be held on April 6, 2026, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. in room 128 of the Sterling Law Building.

The lecture is open to the Yale community. To attend, register by Friday, April 3, 2026.

Baird received his undergraduate degree from Yale University summa cum laude and his J.D. from Stanford. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School in 1980 and served as its dean from 1994 to 1999. An expert on corporate reorganizations and contracts, his books include “The Unwritten Law of Corporate Reorganizations,” which appeared in 2022, as well as “Reconstructing Contracts” and “Game Theory and the Law.” Baird’s one-volume overview of U.S. bankruptcy law, “Elements of Bankruptcy,” is now in its seventh edition. He is the editor of the 12th edition of the Dawson & Harvey contracts casebook, which appeared in 2025. 

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, Baird clerked for Judges Shirley M. Hufstedler and Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Ralph K. Winter Jr. ’60 was a Senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. He served as the William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale Law School when appointed to the bench in 1982 and continued to teach at the Law School part-time until 2014.

Winter received the 2017 Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award, which honors an Article III judge who has achieved a distinguished career and made significant contributions to the administration of justice, the advancement of the rule of law, and the improvement of society as a whole. Recipients are chosen by a committee of federal judges consisting of a Supreme Court Justice, an appellate court judge, and a district court judge.

To commemorate the extraordinary influence of Judge Winter as a corporate law scholar and his distinguished career as a jurist, former law clerks and students established The Judge Ralph K. Winter Lectureship on Corporate Law and Governance, under the auspices of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. The inaugural lecture took place in the fall of 2005.

Established in 1999, the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law has a wide-ranging objective to enhance the quality of students’ educational experience and of faculty research in the business law area by increasing exposure to and engagement with contemporary business law issues.