Mark Roe is appointed professor of law

Mark J. Roe, a Columbia Law School professor and current visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has been named professor of law at Harvard – a tenured appointment. A 1975 Harvard Law graduate, Roe has written extensively on corporate law and new methods of corporate reorganization and bankruptcy. At Harvard, he has taught corporate finance and reorganization, as well as a seminar on advanced issues in corporate law.

“I am very happy that Mark Roe has accepted our offer to join the faculty as a professor of law,” Dean Robert C. Clark said. “Mark is a truly extraordinary scholar. He is highly regarded in the fields of corporate finance, corporate governance, and bankruptcy. Our students will benefit immensely from his 20 years of teaching experience and his legal expertise.”

“It’s nice, 25 years later, to return to Harvard Law School,” said Roe, “this time on the other side of classroom’s lectern. There’s a great group of colleagues in the corporate and business area; I look forward to joining them on the faculty.” Roe’s appointment will officially begin in July.

Roe’s scholarship has earned him praise from colleagues across the country. In a recent front-page profile in The Daily Deal – a new business journal – Roe was identified as being “among a handful of scholars devoted to explaining the evolution and history of the principles of corporate governance.”

In his well-known 1994 book, “Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance,” Roe demonstrated how American-style populism fragmented financial intermediaries, making dispersed ownership inevitable in the United States, in a way that it wasn’t in other nations. In 1999, as part of his Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, “Political Determinants of the Separation of Ownership from Control,” Roe showed how European-style social democratic politics historically destabilized large public firms by putting managers at odds with shareholder interests, thereby determining the kinds of ownership structures that would survive.

“I am absolutely delighted that Mark Roe is joining our faculty,” professor and corporate law specialist Reinier H. Kraakman said. “He is the pre-eminent scholar of comparative corporate governance in America today. His presence will add immeasurably to both the depth and scope of our already strong corporate law faculty.”

Roe joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 1988, following several years of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and at the Rutgers University School of Law. Prior to his work as an educator, Roe worked on Wall Street.

Before earning his Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1975, Roe received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1972.