Yesha Yadav

Associate Dean and Robert Belton Director of Diversity, Equity and Community
Milton R. Underwood Chair
Professor of Law
Faculty Co-director, LL.M. Program

Yesha Yadav's research interests lie in financial market regulation, securities regulation and corporate bankruptcy, focusing on market structure, exchange design, payments, digital asset regulation, distressed debt and restructuring. She has developed particular specialization in market microstructure, examining the regulation of trading ecosystems for various asset classes, notably, equity, U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds and cryptocurrencies. 

Before joining Vanderbilt's Law faculty in 2011, Professor Yadav worked as a legal counsel with the World Bank in its finance, private-sector development and infrastructure unit, where she specialized in financial regulation and insolvency, and creditor-debtor rights. Before joining the World Bank in 2009, she practiced from 2004-08 in the London and Paris offices of Clifford Chance in the firm's financial regulation and derivatives group. As part of her work in the area of payments regulation, she advised the European Payments Council on the establishment of the Single Euro Payments Area.

Since joining Vanderbilt, Professor Yadav has served as honorary advisor to India’s Financial Services Law Reform Commission and on the Atlantic Council’s Task Force on Divergence, Transatlantic Financial Reform and G-20 Agenda. She has served as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee, where she sat on the Distributed Ledger Technology and Algorithmic Trading Subcommittees. Professor Yadav is also a member of Nasdaq’s Hearing Panel, and the current Vice-Chair of the Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

Professor Yadav earned an M.A. in Law and Modern Languages (First Class) at the University of Cambridge, after which she earned an LL.M. at Harvard Law School. She was a Vanderbilt University Chancellor Faculty Fellow for 2019-21. In 2022, she won Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Research Award for her research into U.S. Treasury market regulation. She was honored in 2020 as a second-time winner of the student-selected Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award for excellence in teaching.

Representative Publications

• "The Failed Regulation of U.S. Treasury Markets," 121 Columbia Law Review 1173 (2021). Selected for the Best Corporate and Securities Articles of 2021 by Corporate Practice Commentator.
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• "Oversight Failure in Securities Markets," 104 Cornell Law Review 1799 (2019)
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• "Too Big to Fail Shareholders," 103 Minnesota Law Review 587 (2019)
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• "Fintech and the Innovation Trilemma," 107 Georgetown Law Journal 235 (2019) (with Chris Brummer) Selected for reprinting in the Corporate Practice Commentator.
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• "Insider Trading and Market Structure," 63 UCLA Law Review 968 (2016)
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• "How Algorithmic Trading Undermines Efficiency in Capital Markets," 68 Vanderbilt Law Review 1607 (2015) (First Prize Winner, George Washington University/C-Leaf Junior Faculty Workshop, 2015) (earlier draft noted in the Economist and Bloomberg) (cited by the D.C. Circuit in Coburn v. Evercore and by the Sixth Circuit in Paul Saumer v. Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.</i>)
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• "The Failure of Liability in Modern Markets," 102 Virginia Law Review 1031 (2016)
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• "Insider Trading in Derivatives Markets," 103 Georgetown Law Journal 381 (2015) (noted in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg) (chosen by the Corporate Practice Commentator as a top 10 article in securities and corporate law in 2014)
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• "The Case for a Market in Debt Governance," 67 Vanderbilt Law Review 771 (2014)
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• "The Problematic Case of Clearinghouses in Complex Markets," 101 Georgetown Law Journal 387 (2013) (cited by Justice Thomas in the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN