Yesha Yadav, who holds the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law, has received a 2022 Chancellor’s Award for Research in recognition of her research focusing on regulatory oversight of the U.S. Treasury market.
Yadav’s award was announced by Chancellor Daniel Diermeier at the 2022 Fall Faculty Assembly. She was nominated for the honor by Ingrid Wuerth, who holds the Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law and served as the Law School’s associate dean for research from fall 2020 to fall 2022.
The award recognizes Yadav for her article, “The Failed Regulation of U.S. Treasury Markets,” published in the Columbia Law Review in 2021. The article was recognized by the Corporate Practice Commentator as among the top 10 articles focusing on corporate and securities law published in 2021.
“Yesha’s work provide a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the U.S. Treasury market and its weaknesses, while also providing proposals for reforming that market — careful proposals that have a real chance of adoption,” Diermeier said.
In the article, Yadav identifies weaknesses in the structure of the U.S. Treasury market that threaten its stability. “These fragilities reflect a public oversight framework that is fragmented and outdated and cannot deliver robust oversight, and private self-regulation that is inadequate to fill the gap left by an ineffective system of public supervision,” she said.
As a result, the Treasury market is “fragile” and “vulnerable to failure and risk-taking as traders lack a sufficient economic interest to maintain market integrity,” she writes.
Her article concludes by offering two proposals aimed at strengthening both public and private oversight of the Treasury market.
“Yesha’s article provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the U.S. treasury market and its weaknesses,” Wuerth said. “She poses the question of what it means for the world economy if the financial market thought to be the world’s safest—U.S. Treasury bills—is actually in great peril.”
Yadav joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2011 from the legal staff of the World Bank, where she worked in its finance, private-sector development and infrastructure unit and specialized in financial regulation and insolvency and creditor-debtor rights. She had previously practiced in the London and Paris offices of Clifford Chance in the firm’s financial regulation and derivatives group. She holds a master’s from the University of Cambridge and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.
She currently serves as the Law School’s Associate Dean and Robert Belton Director of Diversity, Equity and Community and as faculty co-director of the LL.M. program. She teaches Securities Regulation, Corporate Bankruptcy, and seminars focusing on the financial markets.