Spotlight

In spring 2009, Cornell Law School will host two visiting professors who are specialists in headline issues of economic and corporate governance law.

David A. Hoffman, Associate Professor of Law at Temple University, will teach Contracts II and a Law and Economics seminar. Hoffman, who studies behavioral law and economics, empirical legal studies, and private dispute resolution, is also hoping to spend time researching two ongoing projects. The first looks at veil piercing litigation in federal district courts; the second looks at the progress of dispute resolution on Wikipedia. “I and a co-author,” says Hoffman, “are looking at how Wikipedia's dispute resolution system, which includes binding formal arbitration run by volunteers, helps to coordinate large-scale social production.” Hoffman’s research is part of the “new legal realism” movement, an empirically rooted inquiry into how the law is produced and how citizens respond to its commands. He has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Yale University.

Christine Windbichler, a law professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, will teach Comparative Corporate Government, which will address current developments in corporate and capital market law in several countries. Windbichler will ask her students to read the daily newspaper as well as texts— “Business news, especially if an instructive new scandal happens to come up, will be used, too,” she says. In Germany, she teaches comparative corporate governance, corporations, labor relations, and business law. She has published extensively in both German and English. Windbichler previously taught at the University of Freiburg and practiced law in Munich. Along with four German degrees, she holds a L.M. from the University of California Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law.