Roberta Romano ’80 Appointed Sterling Professor of Law; Henry Hansmann ’74 Named Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law

The Yale Corporation has voted to approve endowed professorships for two Yale Law School professors. Roberta Romano ’80 has been named a Sterling Professor of Law, one of the University’s highest faculty honors. She is the first woman at the Law School to be named a Sterling Professor. And Henry Hansmann ’74 has been named the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law.

“These are two of the most prestigious chairs at the law school, and it is such a great pleasure to see them filled by two such deserving colleagues,” said Yale Law School Dean Robert Post ’77.

Roberta Romano joined the Yale Law School faculty as a professor of law in 1985. She was named the Allen Duffy/Class of 1960 Professor of Law in 1991 and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law in 2005. She is director of Yale Law School’s Center for the Study of Corporate Law and is a professor (by courtesy) at the Yale School of Management.

Her research has focused on state competition for corporate charters, the political economy of takeover regulation, shareholder litigation, institutional investor activism in corporate governance, and the regulation of financial instruments and securities markets.

In addition to numerous articles and papers, Professor Romano is the author of The Advantage of Competitive Federalism for Securities Regulation and The Genius of American Corporate Law and editor of Foundations of Corporate Law (2d ed.). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Corporate Governance Institute; a research associate of the National Bureau for Economic Research; a past president of the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies; and a past co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

She holds a B.A. from the University of Rochester, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Henry Hansmann joined the Yale Law School faculty as a professor of law in 1983. In 1988, he was named the Sam Harris Professor of Law. He left Yale in 2003 to serve for a year as a professor of law at New York University School of Law. He returned to Yale in 2004 as the Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law.

Professor Hansmann’s scholarship has focused principally on the law and economics of organizational ownership and design. He has written extensively about nonprofit organizations, the relationship between contract law and organizational law, the historical evolution of organizational forms, and the structure of property rights.

In addition to his many articles, he is the author of The Ownership of Enterprise and, with others, The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Functional and Comparative Analysis. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and past president of the American Law and Economics Association.

He holds a B.A. from Brown, as well as a J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale.

The Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professorship of Law was established by a bequest of Oscar M. Ruebhausen ’37.