Biography

An experienced practitioner of corporate and securities law before entering academia, Ronald Gilson is the author of major casebooks on corporate finance and corporate acquisitions. He has written widely on U.S. and comparative corporate governance and on venture capital and was a reporter of the American Law Institute’s Corporate Governance Project. Professor Gilson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Corporate Governance Institute, and is the board chair for American Century Mountain View Mutual Funds, managing over $26 billion in assets. In addition to his role at Stanford Law School, he is the Marc and Eva Stern Professor of Law and Business at Columbia University School of Law.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979, Professor Gilson was a partner at a San Francisco corporate law firm. He clerked for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In the News

• Responding To Activist Investors, Companies Give Poison Pill More Punch
  The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, June 18, 2008
• A Wounded Yahoo May Yet Tempt 'Wolf Packs'
  Marketwatch, May 12, 2008
• Yahoo Shares Slide After Bid Withdrawn
  ABC 7 News, May 05, 2008

Courses & Programs

Courses

• Corporate Acquisitions

Programs

• John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, Charles J. Meyers Professor of Law and Business

Publications & Cases

Recent Publications View All

• Ronald J. Gilson and Curtis J. Milhaupt, Sovereign Wealth Funds and Corporate Governance: A Minimalist Response to the New Merchantilism, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper, No. 355 (March 2008).
• Ronald J. Gilson and Charles K. Whitehead, Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, and Complete Capital Markets, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Paper, No. 346 / Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper, No. 302 (2007).
• Ronald J. Gilson, Controlling Family Shareholders in Developing Countries: Anchoring Relational Exchange, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper, No. 333 / Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper, No. 311 (2007).
• Ronald Gilson, Victor Goldberg, Michael Klausner, and Daniel Raff. Building Foundations For A Durable Deal, Financial Times, October 12, 2006.
• Ronald J. Gilson and Reinier Kraakman, Clark's Treatise on Corporate Law: Filling Manning's Empty Towers (Symposium: Robert Clark's Corporate Law: Twenty Years of Change), 31 Journal of Corporation Law 599 (2006).
• Ronald J. Gilson, Catalyzing Corporate Governance: The Evolution of the United States System in the 1980s and 1990s, 24 Company and Securities Law Journal 143 (2006).
• Ronald J. Gilson, Controlling Shareholders and Corporate Governance: Complicating the Comparative Taxonomy, 119 Harvard Law Review 1641 (2006).
• Ronald J. Gilson, Law and Economics in the Law Firm: The Case of MACS, in New Frontiers of Law and Economics: First International Scientific Conference on Law and Economics at the University of St. Gallen, Peter Nobel and Ernst Mohr, eds., Zurich: Schulthess, 2006.
• Ronald J. Gilson, Controlling Shareholders and Corporate Governance: Complicating The Comparative Taxonomy, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper, no. 309 (2005).
• Ronald J. Gilson, Choice as Regulatory Reform: The Case of Japanese Corporate Governance, 53 American Journal of Comparative Law 343 (2005). (with Curtis J. Milhaupt)

Affiliations & Honors

Honors and Awards

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences