Margaret Blair

Professor of Law Emerita, Vanderbilt University Law School

Margaret Blair is an economist whose scholarship focuses on management, law, and finance. She joined the Vanderbilt Law School faculty in 2004 as part of the team supporting the Law and Business program and retired with “Emerita” status in 2020. Professor Blair previously served on the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center as a Sloan Visiting Professor and as Research Director for the Sloan-GULC Project on Business Institutions, from 2000 through June 2004. Prior to that, she was a Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, where she wrote about corporate governance and the role of human capital in corporations. She has published numerous books and articles on team production and the legal structure of business organizations, legal issues in the governance of supply chains, the legal concept of corporate “personhood,” the problem of excessive leverage in financial markets, and the culture of boards of directors. Her article with the late Prof. Lynn A. Stout, “A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law,” Virginia Law Review, March 1999, is one of the ten most frequently cited articles ever published on corporate law. Her scholarship and commentaries have appeared in numerous professional journals and essay collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital (Oxford, 2011) and The Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law (Edward Elgar, 2012). She served on the board of directors of Sonic Corp from 2000 to 2006. Professor Blair holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Oklahoma (1973) and an M.A., M.Phil. and PhD. in economics from Yale University (1989).

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