Cynthia Williams
Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Prof. Cynthia Williams, Osler Chair in Business Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada. Professor Williams practiced law for five years at the firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City, concentrating on securities, mergers and acquisitions and antitrust cases. From 1995 through 2013 Professor Williams was on the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Law, with research visits to Cambridge University; Georgetown University; the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam; and Osgoode Hall Law School, where she was the inaugural Osler Chair in Business Law from 2007-2009. Professor Williams writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, and transnational private business regulation, most often in interdisciplinary collaborations with John Conley (anthropology and law); Deborah Rupp (organizational psychology); and Ruth Aguilera (economic sociology). Her work has been published in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Georgetown Law Review, the Journal of Corporation Law, the University of Virginia Law Review, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, the Academy of Management Review, and Organizational Behavior. Her current research is examining DNB’s supervision of behavior and culture, conducted together with Prof. Lodewijk Smeehuijzen of the VU. Professor Williams is active in policy work, helping to found the Climate Bond Initiative, a London-based charity that is developing a new asset class, climate bonds, to fund the transition to a low-carbon economy; helping to found the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, a global think-tank of academics and financial market participants; and most recently acting on behalf of a coalition of environmental organizations in drafting a Comment Letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. arguing for required sustainability disclosure by publicly-listed companies.