
Prof. Cynthia Williams
Osler Chair in Business Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada, and Professor of U.S. Corporate and Securities Law, the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Professor Cynthia Williams joined Osgoode Hall Law School on July 1, 2013 as the Osler Chair in Business Law, a position she also held from 2007 to 2009; and was appointed to a part-time position as Professor of U.S. Corporate Law and Securities at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam in April of 2017. Before coming to Osgoode, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law and, prior to that, she practised law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. She writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, comparative corporate governance, and regulatory theory, often in interdisciplinary collaborations with professors in anthropology, economic sociology, and organizational psychology. Her work has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Journal of Corporation Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, the University of New South Wales Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Academy of Management Review, the Corporate Governance International Review, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior, among others. Professor Williams also engages in policy work through her board membership in the Climate Bonds Initiative, a London-based NGO creating a new asset class, Climate Bonds, to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy; the Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative, part of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme, which is evaluating directors’ and trustees’ legal obligations to consider climate change risk in companies’ strategies and securities disclosure; and was the principal author of a petition submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October, 2018, asking the SEC to engage in rule-making to require greater sustainability (environmental, social, and governance) disclosure.