Vanderbilt University Law School

Margaret Blair

Professor of Law

Voice: (615) 322-6087
Fax: (615) 322-6631
Email: margaret.blair@vanderbilt.edu
Office: Room 257
View curriculum vitae (.pdf)

Research Interest(s)

The legal structure of business organizations; corporate governance; role of corporations in globalization

Education

M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University
B.A. University of Oklahoma

Biography

Margaret Mendenhall Blair is an economist who focuses on management law. She joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2004 as part of the team supporting the Law and Business program, which the law school offers in conjunction with the Owen Graduate School of Business at Vanderbilt. She moved to Vanderbilt from 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. Her current research focuses on three areas: team production and the legal structure of business organizations, legal issues in the governance of supply chains, and the role of private sector governance arrangements in contract enforcement. She served on the board of directors of Sonic Corp. from 2001 through 2006 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 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)

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