Margaret Mendenhall Blair
Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise
Voice: (615) 322-6087
Fax: (615) 322-6631
Email: margaret.blair@vanderbilt.edu
Office: Room 257
View curriculum vitae (.pdf)
Links
- SSRN Page
- "Leadership Is More than Profit" - opinion piece coauthored with Ralph Gomory
- Law & Business Program
Research Interest(s)
Team production and the legal structure of business organizations; corporate governance; corporate “personhood”; the problem of excessive leverage in financial markets
Education
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University
B.A. University of Oklahoma
Biography
Margaret Blair is an economist who focuses on management law. Her current research focuses on five areas: team production and the legal structure of business organizations, legal issues in the governance of supply chains, the role of private sector governance arrangements in contract enforcement, the legal concept of corporate “personhood,” and the problem of excessive leverage in financial markets. Professor Blair was appointed to the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise in fall 2010. She joined Vanderbilt's law faculty in 2004 and is affiliated with the Law and Business Program. Before joining Vanderbilt's law faculty, Professor Blair taught at Georgetown University Law Center, where she became a visiting professor in 1996 and served as a Sloan Visiting Professor, teaching Corporations and Corporate Finance, and as research director for the Sloan-GULC Project on Business Institutions, from 2000 through June 2004. She has also been a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, where she wrote about corporate governance and the role of human capital in corporations. She served on the board of directors of Sonic Corp. from 2001-06 and currently serves on the board of WRAP (Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production).
Representative Publications
Books
Ownership and Control: Rethinking Corporate Governance for the Twenty-first Century (Brookings, 1995). This book won an academic book publishers award, and has been translated into Chinese and republished by the Chinese Social Science Publishing House in Beijing.
Articles
“The Four Functions of Corporate Personhood,” Handbook of Economic Organization, (Anna Grandori, ed.), Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. (forthcoming, 2012)
“Financial Innovation, Leverage, Bubbles, and the Distribution of Income,” 30 Review of Banking and Financial Law (2011)
"The New Role for Assurance Services in Global Commerce," 33 Journal of Corporation Law 2 (2008) (with Cynthia A. Williams and Li-Wen Lin)
"Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century," 51 UCLA Law Review 387 (2003). Republished in Top 10 Corporate Practice Commentator (2004)
"Reforming Corporate Governance: What History Can Teach Us," 1 Berkeley Business Law Journal 1 (2004)
"Relational Investing and Firm Performance," 27 Journal of Financial Research 1 (2004) (with Sanjai Bhagat and Bernard Black)
"Shareholder Value, Corporate Governance, and Corporate Performance: A Post-Enron Reassessment of the Conventional Wisdom," in Peter K. Cornelius and Bruce Kogut, eds., Corporate Governance and Capital Flows in a Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003, 53-82)
"Trust, Trustworthiness, and the Behavioral Foundations of Corporate Law," 149 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1735 (2001) (with Lynn Stout)
"Firm-Specific Human Capital and the Theories of the Firm," in Employees and Corporate Governance, 58-90 (Blair and Roe, eds., Brookings, 2000)
"A Team Production Theory of Corporation Law," 85 Virginia Law Review 247 (1999) (with Lynn Stout). Reprinted as the lead article in 24 Journal of Corporate Law 751 (1999). This article was recently identified by Michigan Law Review as one of the ten most-cited articles of all time in the field of Corporate and Securities Law.
Presentations
“Making Money: Leverage and Private Sector Money Creation,” conference Comparing Indian and US Corporate Governance, Financial Regulation and Intellectual Property Rights, Hyderabad, India, May 30–31, 2012; Berle IV Conference on Regulating Risk in Financial/Securities Markets, June 14 – 15, 2012 at University College of Law in London, co-sponsored by Seattle University School of Law and the University College of Law, London, England
“The Four Functions of Corporate Personhood,” University of Seattle Law School, January, 2012; University of Illinois College of Law; Vanderbilt Law & Business Program Conference, London, England; Business History Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 2012; and American University Washington College of Law, April 2012
“Financial Innovation, Leverage, Bubbles and the Distribution of Income,” faculty workshop, University of British Columbia Law School, Vancouver, British Columbia; Downtown Speaker Series, National Center for Business Law, Vancouver, November 2011; Law & Business Program Conference on Reforming Financial Markets, Lugano, Switzerland, December 2011
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