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Past Law and Business Entrepreneurship Fellows

2021-23

2021 Jacobson fellow

Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

Sergio is the Jacobson Fellow at New York University School of Law. He specializes in corporate law, corporate governance, corporate theory, and legal personhood. His research investigates the nature and purpose of corporations as well as cutting-edge corporate governance and corporate law issues, with an emphasis on retail investors.

Sergio’s work has appeared in the Boston University Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Mississippi Law Journal, the Nevada Law Journal, the Ohio State University Law Journal Online, the Seattle University Law Review, and the Australian Journal of Corporate Law. It has also been featured in blogs and magazines, including the University of Chicago Business Law Review Blog (for which he co-authored the inaugural guest academic article), the CLS Blue Sky Blog (the Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and Capital Markets), TheCorporateCounsel.net, The FinReg Blog of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke University School of Law, Forbes, the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, the Machine Lawyering Blog of the Centre for Financial Regulation and Economic Development at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Oxford Business Law Blog. In addition, Sergio co-authored the book Citizen Capitalism: How a Universal Fund Can Provide Influence and Income to All.

Sergio’s main strand of research investigates how models of share ownership and the corporate governance infrastructure determine the ability of average citizens to participate in the corporate sector. His work in this field has been trailblazing: not just examining structures but exploring different pathways to increase the participation of regular citizens in corporations’ decisions and profits. He has been investigating private ordering solutions as well as the opportunities arising from the fintech-driven resurgence of retail investors as a market game-changer. Retail investors are individuals who invest directly in financial markets such as the average citizen who invests a few hundred dollars in company shares. Sergio’s work analyzes the growth of retail investing both to investigate its normative implications and to describe how it increases the publicness of business corporations. The public dimension of corporations is critical to his scholarship as he is also concerned with the partly-private-partly-public nature of business corporations as it relates to the origins of the corporate form.

Prior to joining NYU, Sergio served as a visiting assistant professor of law at Cornell Law School, where he was also the assistant director of the Clarke Program on Corporations & Society, and held a tenure-track position at Monash University, in Australia. At Cornell Law School, Sergio taught the mainstream Business Organizations course as well as the seminars Comparative Corporate Governance and Corporations and Other Legal Persons and the class Law and Policy of Food Systems.

Research Interests

Corporate law, corporate governance, law and technology, history of corporations, ESG, corporations and society, legal personhood, and comparative law.

Teaching Interests

Primary Teaching Preferences: Business Associations, Contracts, Corporate Governance, M&A, Securities Regulation, Financial Regulation, Comparative Corporate Law, and Corporate Finance.

Secondary Teaching Preferences: Law and Technology, Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Private Law, Food Law, and Roman Law.

Publications

Books

Citizen Capitalism: How A Universal Fund Can Provide Influence and Income to All (Berrett-Koehler Press, 2019) (with Lynn Stout & Tamara Belinfanti)   

Book Chapters

"Harnessing the Collective Power of Retail Investors," A Research Agenda for Corporate Law (Christopher M. Bruner & Marc Moore, Eds.) (Edward Elgar Publishing) (forthcoming) (with Christina M. Sautter) (invited book chapter)

Articles and Other Law Journal Contributions

"The Corporate Forum," 102 B.U.L. Rev. 1861 (2022) (with Christina M. Sautter) (invited response)

"The Educated Retail Investor: A Response to “Regulating Democratized Investing,” Ohio St. L.J. Online (forthcoming) (with Christina M. Sautter) (invited response)

"Sacred Corporate Law," 45 Seattle U. L. Rev. 413 (2021) (with Mohamed Arafa and Giancarlo Anello) (invited Article—Berle XII Symposium)

The Wireless Investors Movement", U. Chi. Bus. L. Rev.: Online Edition (2022) (with Christina M. Sautter) (invited) (inaugural guest academic article)

"Corporate Governance Gaming: The Collective Power of Retail Investors", 22 Nev. L.J. 51 (2021) (with Christina M. Sautter)

"Artificial Agents in Corporate Boardrooms," 105 Cornell L. Rev. 869 (2020)

"Archeology, Language, and Nature of Business Corporations," 89 Miss. L.J. 43 (2019)

"Corporate Governance as Privately-Ordered Public Policy: A Proposal," 41 Seattle U. L. Rev.

551 (2018) (with Lynn Stout) (invited Article—Berle IX Symposium)

The Abstract Void in Practice: Has the Statutory Business Judgment Rule Changed the ‘Acoustic Separation’ Between Conduct and Decision Rules for Directors’ Duty of Care?, 31 Austl. Corp. L.J. 107 (2016) (with Jake Miyairi)

Education

BOCCONI UNIVERSITY, MILAN, ITALY
Ph.D. in Law of Business and Commerce, April 2015. Full Fellowship (Ph.D. Advisor: Lynn Stout)
Dissertation on the origins and attributes of corporations with emphasis on the rationales of delegated management. 

UNIVERSITY OF MILAN, MILAN, ITALY
Laurea Magistrale in Law (J.D. equivalent), 110 e lode (summa cum laude equivalent), October 2009
Thesis on tracking stocks in the U.S. and in Italy.

UNIVERSITY OF MILAN, MILAN, ITALY
Legal Sciences, November 2007

2019-21

Tal Kastner, 2019-2021 Jacobson Fellow

Tal Kastner

Tal was the Jacobson Fellow in Law and Business at New York University Law School from 2019-201. She was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at NYU Law from 2016-2019.

Her research focused on contract law and the operation of legal language in social and historical context. She published articles on contract, law and society, as well as other topics in the Georgetown Law Journal, Law and Social Inquiry, and SMU Law Review, among other publications. She wrote a book entitled The Age of Boilerplate: Agreement and Agency in American Law and Literature about the role of standard contract language in shaping the idea and experience of freedom in the United States. 

Tal hods a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a PhD from Princeton, and a B.A. with honors from the University of Pennsylvania. She practiced at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, advising clients on a range of transactional matters, including corporate law, regulatory compliance, securities law, and mergers and acquisitions. In addition, she has taught as a Lecturer at Princeton, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow of Law and Interdisciplinary Studies at Cardozo Law School.

Following law school, she served as a law clerk for President Aharon Barak and Justice Dalia Dorner of the Supreme Court of Israel. 

Publications:

Form Contracts, in  Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (Maksymillian Del Mar, Bernadette Meyler & Simon Stern eds., 2020). 

Boilerplate: Deconstructing the Fiction of Contract, in Fictional Discourse Fictional Discourse And The Law (Hans Lind ed., 2020). 

Contract Creep, 107 Geo. L.J. 1277 (2019) (with Ethan Leib). 

Policing Narrative, 71 Smu L. Rev. 1117 (2018) (reprinted in The Legal Writing Institute Monograph Series on Legal Justice (2020)).

Deviance in Nineteenth Century American Law and Culture, in Routledge Research Companion To Law And The Humanities In Nineteenth Century America (Simon Stern & Nan Goodman eds., 2017). 

“I'm Just some Guy”: Positing and Leveraging Legal Subjects in Consumer Contracts and the Global Market, 23 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 531 (2016). [link]

“Bartleby”: A Story of Boilerplate, 23 Law & Literature 365 (2011). 

The Persisting Ideal of Agreement in an Age of Boilerplate, 35 Law & Soc. Inquiry 793 (2010). 

2018-19

Emily Winston

Emily served as a Jacobson Research Fellow in Law and Business at New York University School of Law from 2016-2019. From 2014 to 2016, she was a Clinic Fellow and Supervising Attorney in NYU Law’s Business Law Transactions Clinic.

Before joining NYU Law, Emily practiced at Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP and Paul Hastings LLP, where her practice focused on cross-border securities and corporate finance transactions involving Latin American businesses. She also served as a C.V. Starr Lecturer at Peking University School of Transactional Law in Shenzhen, China from 2010 – 2011 where she taught several courses on legal research and writing. 

Emily holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Government and Politics, with honors, from the University of Maryland and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.  Her research examined the relative influence of different stakeholder groups on corporate decision-making.  Her other research interests include corporate governance and regulation, law and development, and social entrepreneurship.  Emily is a member of the New York State Bar.

Publications:

Benefit Corporations and the Separation of Benefit and Control, 39 Cardozo L. Rev. 1783 (2018).

Managerial Fixation and the Limitations of Shareholder Oversight, 71 Hastings L.J. 699 (2020).

2017-19

Dr. Anat Alon-Beck    

Anat was the 2017-2019 Jacobson Fellow in Law and Business at New York University School of Law. Her research focus was on corporate law, corporate governance, entrepreneurship, and innovation, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on the intersection of law with business, management, finance, ethics, strategy, society, sustainability, and the natural environment. She was passionate about empowering women to advance in entrepreneurship and leadership positions in the business world.

Anat holds J.S.D. and LL.M. degrees, with honors, from Cornell Law School, where she served as an Editor of the Cornell International Law Journal. She received her LL.B. from Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, and served as an Associate Editor of Theoretical Inquiries in Law.

Previously, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor, in the Department of International Business and Management at Dickinson College. At Dickinson, she co-developed the Eco-E Path Mosaic, which incorporated the study of sustainable entrepreneurship into Dickinson’s liberal arts program, and paved the way for the newly designed Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate.

Publications and Works in Progress:

Unicorn Stock Options - A Golden Goose or Trojan Horse? Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2019, 2019 Colum. Bus. L. Rev. 107 (2019)

Alternative Venture Capital: The New Unicorn Investors, 88 Tennessee Law Review 985 (2020), Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2020-26

Preparing for the Apocalypse: A Multi-Prong Proposal to Develop Countermeasures for Biological, Chemical, Radiological, and Nuclear Threats (with Constance E. Bagley), 40 Cardozo L. Rev 823 (2018), Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2018

The Law of Social Entrepreneurship - Creating Shared Value through the Lens of Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics, 3 (20) U. Pa. J. Bus. L., forthcoming 20 J. Bus. L. 520 (2018), Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2018.

The Coalition Model, A Private-Public Strategic Innovation Policy Model for Encouraging Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth in the Era of New Economic Challenges, 2 (17) Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev., forthcoming Spring 2018 (listed on SSRN’s top 10 download list).

The Modern Corporation Statement on Company Law Stout, L., Robé, J., Ireland, P., Deakin, S. F., Greenfield, K., Johnston, A., et al. (2016).