Bernard Sharfman
Bernard S. Sharfman is a Senior Corporate Governance Fellow with the RealClearFoundation, a research fellow with the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, and a member of the Journal of Corporation Law's editorial advisory board.
Mr. Sharfman has written extensively on corporate law and governance. His recent writings have included:
Opportunism in the Shareholder Voting and Engagement of the ‘Big Three’ Investment Advisers to Index Funds (forthcoming, Journal of Corporation Law); The Illusion of Success: A Critique of Engine No. 1's Proxy Fight at ExxonMobil (Harvard Business Law Review Online 2022); How Discretionary Decision-Making Impacts the Financial Performance and Legal Disclosures of S&P 500 Funds (with Vincent Deluard, Director of Market Research, StoneX; forthcoming, Brooklyn Law Review 2022); Liberating the Market for Corporate Control (with Marc T. Moore; Berkeley Business Law Journal 2021); ESG Investing Under ERISA (Yale Journal on Regulation Online (2020)); The Risks and Rewards of Shareholder Voting (SMU Law Review 2020); Now is the Time to Designate Proxy Advisors as Fiduciaries under ERISA (Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance 2019); The Undesirability of Mandatory Time-Based Sunsets in Dual Class Share Structures: A Reply to Bebchuk and Kastiel (Southern California Law Rev. Postscript 2019); Enhancing the Value of Shareholder Voting Recommendations (Tennessee Law Review); A Private Ordering Defense of a Company’s Right to Use Dual Class Share Structures in IPOs, (Villanova Law Review 2018); The Importance of the Business Judgment Rule (New York University Journal of Law & Business 2018); Shareholder Activism as a Corrective Mechanism in Corporate Governance (with Paul Rose; Brigham Young University Law Review 2015); Activist Hedge Funds in a World of Board Independence: Creators or Destroyers of Long-Term Value? (Columbia Business Law Review 2016); and A Theory of Shareholder Activism as its Place in Corporate Law (Tennessee Law Review 2016).
Mr. Sharfman has peer reviewed articles for the Stanford Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Mr. Sharfman has written a number of comment letters to the SEC, NASDAQ, Department of Labor, and the New York Stock Exchange and his blog posts can be found on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Columbia Law School's Blue Sky Blog, the Oxford Business Law Blog, the University of Chicago Business Law Review Blog, and Duke Law School's FinReg Blog.
Mr. Sharfman has practiced corporate and securities law and is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center (J.D., 2000). At Georgetown, he was an Executive Editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics and a recipient of the journal's Saint Thomas More Award.
Commentary
How the ‘Market Share Opportunism’ of Investment Advisers is Harming Investors and Public Companies
Investment advisors on both sides of the aisle have coopted ESG for their own exploitative marketing tactics to increase their own assets...
ESG & Corporate Governance
Will “Portfolio Primacy” Throw a Monkey Wrench in Elon Musk’s Plans to Acquire Twitter?
The SEC's definition of fiduciary duty allows institutional shareholders to vote against Elon Musk's Twitter takeover bid thanks to portfolio primacy.
Latest news
Antitrust and Competition
Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent
On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.
Event Notes
ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly
The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.
Commentary
Reregulate.
Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.
Antitrust and Competition
A World With Far Fewer Mergers
Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.
Commentary
The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies
The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.
Antitrust and Competition
The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines
A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...
Antitrust and Competition
Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market
While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.
