Professor Elisabeth de Fontenay

Elisabeth de Fontenay is the Karl W. Leo Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University. Her research is in the fields of corporate law and corporate finance, with a particular focus on how market actors behave in the less-regulated spaces of the financial markets.  Her work (available here) has examined questions such as the ongoing decline in U.S. public companies and the rise of private capital, private equity firms’ role in the debt markets and in corporate governance, public versus private financial markets, complexity in financial contracting, and value creation by transactional lawyers.  

She has testified before Congress and presented her research at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), and an Associate Reporter for the ALI’s Restatement of the Law of Corporate Governance. She also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association.

Professor de Fontenay received her B.A. in Economics, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Princeton University, and her J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.  After graduating from law school, de Fontenay practiced as a corporate associate at Ropes & Gray, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions, debt financing, and private investment funds. Her scholarly articles are available for download here.