Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Context, Fifth Edition

Cynthia Williams

Professor Cynthia Williams joined Osgoode Hall Law School on July 1, 2013 as the Osler Chair in Business Law, a position she also held from 2007 to 2009. She also currently holds a part-time position as Professor of U.S. Corporate and Securities Law at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam. Before joining Osgoode, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law, where she is an emerita Professor of Law, and, prior to that, she practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City in securities, mergers and acquisitions, and civil rights.

Professor Williams writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, comparative corporate governance, and regulatory theory, often in interdisciplinary collaborations with professors in anthropology, economic sociology, and organizational psychology. Professor Williams’ work has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Journal of Corporation Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, the University of New South Wales Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Academy of Management Review, the Corporate Governance International Review, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior, among others.

Professor Williams has lectured and taught in China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, the UK and throughout Canada and the United States.

Professor Williams also engages in policy work through her board membership in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, a think-tank of academics and financial market participants; the Climate Bonds Initiative, an NGO established to create a new asset class, Climate Bonds, in order to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy; and as a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finance Advisory Board.

D. Gordon Smith

Dean Smith is a leading figure in the field of law and entrepreneurship and has done foundational work on fiduciary theory. He has also made important contributions to the academic literature on corporate governance and transactional lawyering.

Dean Smith served as the associate director of the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin, where he launched the annual Law & Entrepreneurship Retreat. More recently, he co-founded (with Brian Broughman of the Indiana University School of Law) the Law & Entrepreneurship Association, a scholarly society that encourages the study of law and entrepreneurship by organizing conferences and building networks of scholars. He is also one of the founding faculty members of the Crocker Innovation Fellowship at BYU.

Throughout his career, Dean Smith has been active in developing scholarly communities. In 2004 he co-founded (with Christine Hurt, also of BYU Law School) The Conglomerate Blog, a popular law professor blog focusing on business law. He has served as Chair of the Section on Business Associations in the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and he participated in the creation of the Section on Transactional Law and Skills, for which he currently serves as Secretary. In 2009 he served on the planning committee for the AALS Workshop on Transactional Law. During that same year, he co-founded the annual Rocky Mountain Junior Scholars Forum. In 2012 he co-founded (with Afra Afsharipour of UC Davis School of Law) the Transactional Law Workshop, a monthly virtual gathering of transactional law scholars. And in 2013, he co-founded (with Colleen Baker) the Business Ethics Book Club, a virtual book club of law professors, who meet once a semester to discuss a recent work on business ethics.

During his five years as the Associate Dean of Faculty and Curriculum (2009-14), BYU Law School developed a large number of new course offerings, including a Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic. He has taught at six law schools in the U.S., as well as law programs in Australia, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, and Hong Kong. Before entering academe, Dean Smith clerked for Judge W. Eugene Davis in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and was an associate in the Delaware office of the international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Sung Eun (Summer) Kim

Summer Kim is Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law (UCI Law). Professor Kim’s primary research and teaching interests are in corporate law, corporate governance, financial regulation and contracts. Her scholarship examines how legal and market structures create and deepen inequities in our society, and her work aims to close these gaps.

Professor Kim is also the inaugural Faculty Director of the Korea Law Center at UCI Law and has served in this role since 2016. The mission of the Korea Law Center is to promote practical solutions to problems arising at the intersection of U.S. and Korean laws. In recognition of her service to the Korean community, Professor Kim received the Trailblazer Award from the Orange County Korean American Bar Association (OC KABA) in 2016.

Prior to law teaching, Professor Kim practiced law at Kirkland & Ellis and Shearman & Sterling, where she specialized in the areas of debt finance and capital markets. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in Economics, summa cum laude, from Seoul National University. She is a member of the New York and California bars."