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Professor Sarah Haan joined Ó£ÌÒÊÓƵ this fall as the inaugural Sheridan Albert ’48 Professor of Law, a professorship made possible by the largest gift in the Law School’s history. The gift will allow her to build upon the research that has made her a standout legal scholar nationwide.   

In a Q&A, Haan described her career path and her pioneering research on corporate governance law, and explained why it is so thrilling to teach—and learn about – business law at this moment in Brooklyn.      

Can you explain the ties that have given you such an affinity for New York City?  

I graduated from Columbia Law School and then practiced as a Wall Street lawyer before I made the move into legal academia, which took me outside of New York. My first tenure-track job was in Idaho, and my next was in Virginia [at Washington and Lee University School of Law]. But ±õ’v±ð kept up my admission to the New York bar and I still think of myself as a Wall Street lawyer. When you teach business law, you want to be where the action is. It feels like I have come to the center of the world for the thing that I do. 

What is happening in New York now that has caught your interest? 

I teach classes that are about the law of capitalism, and I was very interested during the New York City mayoral race to see the challenges that some people were raising to capitalism itself. New York voters seem extremely open to challenges to capitalism today, in a way that ±õ’v±ð not seen before in my career. For those working at the highest levels of corporate law, this is a moment of reflection. What has gone wrong? Why has corporate capitalism not delivered the kind of world that people want to live in? This really is a wake-up moment for the business community, and it will be interesting to see how members respond.  

What first sparked your interest in business law? 

During law school, as a summer associate at Davis Polk, I loved being involved in the most exciting cases, the cases that made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I felt lucky to experience an incredibly dynamic, fast-paced practice of law involving some of the most important legal questions at that time. It was intellectually challenging and fun to work with businesspeople at these major New York City financial institutions and big corporations, and of course the training I received at Davis Polk was excellent. Then when Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley [Act of 2002, mandating corporate accountability and financial transparency], securities law started to change and I was on the front lines of watching that as well, which was so exciting. This is something that I try to stress with my students, that business law is every bit as thrilling as constitutional law.  

You made a full-time transition into academia after a fellowship at Columbia Law School and a stint teaching legal writing at Pace Law School. What drew you in? 

While I enjoyed being a practicing lawyer, that job is to serve the clien³Ù²õ’ interests and, of course, we were always stumbling across fascinating issues of law that we »å¾±»å²Ô’t have to explore or resolve. I couldn't work on these issues, except insofar as they touched on a client's interests. I found that I really wanted to go back and research and write about those interesting issues that were being left on the cutting-room floor. The nice thing about being an academic is that your scholarship is yours alone. You can pursue an intellectually interesting issue of law to the ground and devote weeks and weeks of your time to figuring out what really should be the right answer in a way that you can't do when you're practicing law. 

Of course, I also love teaching business law to students. I tell students that the Business Associations course is "How the World Works 101," and I mean it. ±õ³Ù’s really gratifying to open studen³Ù²õ’ eyes to business law as a form of legal technology and the basis of human flourishing.  

One of your most buzzed-about works is "," published in the Stanford Law Review. Why did it strike such a chord? 

That article was a historical investigation of shareholding in American public companies. It showed that women became a majority of public-company shareholders by the mid-1950s, and it asked what light that information might shed on the evolution of American corporate governance law and theory. I showed that the popular and financial press knew all about this transformation at the time, and wrote quite a bit about it, but by the 21st century it had become a lost part of history. Today, corporate law, as a field, can't go back to not knowing that women played this major role.  

Today, in discussions about board diversity, you often find people arguing that a reason we don't see many women on corporate boards is that women came late to capitalism or to having any sort of role in the corporation, that they were never really involved or interested. But my article showed that women didn't come to corporate capitalism late at all. They were investing in businesses in large numbers and actively participating in corporate governance in the earliest part of the 20th century. Women were trying to join corporate boards in the 1930s, ’40s, and&²Ô²ú²õ±è;’50s, and they had the shareholder votes to do it, but for the problem of collective action. An important part of my work right now is focused on mechanisms of shareholder collective action. ±õ’m trying to figure out if there is a better way for shareholders to achieve meaningful self-government in the corporation.