Education

• New York University, JD 1989
• University of California, Berkeley, BA 1981

Biography

Professor Cynthia Williams joined the Maurer School of Law as a visiting professor in August 2022 and as a full-time faculty member in 2023. Previously, she served the Osgoode Hall Law School as the Osler Chair in Business Law from 2013 to 2022, a position she also held from 2007 to 2009. 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.

Professor Williams 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 book The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor, And Finance Capitalism, co-edited with Osgoode Professor Peer Zumbansen, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press and was featured at the Society for Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference in 2012 at MIT.

Professor Williams’ 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 has lectured and taught in China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, the UK and throughout Canada and the United States.

Professor Williams also engages in policy work through her board membership in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, a think-tank of academics and financial market participants; the Climate Bonds Initiative, an NGO established to create a new asset class, Climate Bonds, in order to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy; and as a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finance Advisory Board.

In the Media

• Appeared on "Public companies must start giving investors information about climate, SEC decides," All Things Considered (3/6/2024)
• Quoted in "SEC Climate Rules Risk Legal Battle with Environmental Groups," Bloomberg Law (4/18/2023)
• Mentioned in "Regulating ESG Disclosure," The Regulatory Review (1/28/2023)
• Wrote "Review of Comments on SEC Climate Rulemaking," Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (11/23/2022)

Selected works

The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor, and Finance Capitalism (Cynthia A. Williams & Peer Zumbansen, eds.)(Cambridge University Press, 2011).

D. Gordon Smith, Cynthia A. Williams, and Sung Eun (Summer) Kim, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Aspen Publishing 5th ed. forthcoming 2022), and accompanying Teacher’s Manual.

D. Gordon Smith and Cynthia A. Williams, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Wolters Kluwer 4th ed. 2018), and accompanying Teacher’s Manual.

D. Gordon Smith and Cynthia A. Williams, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Wolters Kluwer/Aspen Press 3d.ed. 2012), and accompanying Teacher’s Manual.

D. Gordon Smith and Cynthia A. Williams, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Aspen Press 2d.ed. 2008), and accompanying Teacher’s Manual.

D. Gordon Smith and Cynthia A. Williams, Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Aspen Press 2004), and accompanying Teacher’s Manual.