Prof. Williams joined the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School in July of 2007 as the inaugural Osler Chair in Business Law. Prof. Williams practiced law at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore as a Litigation Associate, where she primarily handled cases involving securities, mergers and acquisitions, and antitrust issues, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1995.
Professor Williams writes in the areas of securities law and corporate law, with a particular emphasis on institutional investors and corporate responsiblity. Her Harvard Law Review article, “The Securities and Exchange Commission and Corporate Social Transparency,” was the lead article reprinted in the Securities Law Review 2000, and was recognized by the Corporate Practice Commentator as one of the ten best corporate or securities articles published in 1999 (based on a survey of American corporate and securities professors). Her 2007 Academy of Management Review article, Putting the S Back in Corporate Social Responsibility, co-authored with Profs. Ruth Aguilera (business) and Deborah Rupp (organizational psychology) was awarded the Best Paper Prize at the Second Annual International Conference on Corporate Governance, University of Birmingham.
Prof. Williams is a casebook author with Prof. Gordon Smith , publishing a casebook entitled Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies with Aspen Press in 2004. A second edition is forthcoming in 2008.
INTERESTS:
Regulators will be reacting to market events in many jurisdictions, including in the U.S., and thinking about how to regulate the financial system as a whole. Thus, this crisis presents a unique opportunity to try to design a regulatory structure for the markets that makes sense for the future, and doesn’t just solve today’s problems, as important as that goal is. Ideally, the future regulatory stucture would help to connect the financial markets to long-term economic innovation, particularly given the urgent need to shift to a low-carbon economy.
E-mail: CWilliams@osgoode.yorku.ca
Web: http://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty/Williams_Cynthia.html
