Gordon, Webber selected to participate in Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum
David Webber will present on mergers and acquisitions, while Wendy Gordon comments upon the work of IP law scholars at the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum.
Associate Professor of Law David H. Webber’s article, “Does the Quality of the Plaintiffs’ Law Firm Matter in Deal Litigation?”, co-authored with Adam Badawi of Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has been selected for presentation at the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum, to be hosted this year by Harvard Law School, June 16–17. William Fairfield Warren Professor and Professor of Law Wendy Gordon was selected to help shape the work of young scholars as a reviewer and commenter of one of the two intellectual property sessions.
The highly competitive annual forum encourages the work of junior tenure-track faculty by opening a dialogue on what constitutes successful scholarship. Accomplished senior scholars in various fields of law are invited to comment on the merits and methodology of submitted papers to give junior faculty further experience in the pursuit of scholarship and the nature of scholarly exchange.
Professor Webber’s paper was one of 16 papers selected out of 103 submissions, and was one of just three papers selected in the corporate and securities category out of 27 submissions. The study “examines whether the stock market reacts differently to the filing of lawsuits against mergers and acquisitions targets as the quality of the law firm representing the plaintiffs varies.” With data compiled from such cases filed between November 2003 and September 2008 in the Delaware Chancery Court, Webber and Badawi conclude that their evidence is broadly consistent with the theory that markets care about the quality of the plaintiffs’ law firms that bring these suits.
Webber’s research focuses on diverse aspects of investment law, including shareholder activism, corporate governance, and shareholder litigation. His work has been cited by courts and academics, and has been anthologized in Securities Law Review and Corporate Practice Commentator. Webber has published op-eds on shareholder rights and corporate governance topics in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and elsewhere.
An internationally recognized and prolific scholar in the field of copyright law, Gordon’s scholarship utilizes economics as well as both ethical and analytic philosophy to understand copyright, trademark, and related forms of property and tort law. Her current scholarly project seeks to develop an “ideal” model of copyright law, with particular attention to the doctrine known as fair use. The project examines how various legal rights against harm, and legal rights of control, interact with justified personal liberties such as free speech. Her ultimate goal is to reform the law to improve those interactions, from varying perspectives of morality, economics, and internal consistency.
