Lynn Stout

Career

Stout holds a B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton University as well as a Master's in Public Policy from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and a J.D. from the Yale Law School. Until 2012 she was the Paul Hastings Professor of Corporate and Securities Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, after which she joined the Cornell Law School where she is the Distinguished Professor of Corporate & Business Law and Director of the Clarke Program on Corporations & Society. She has also taught at George Washington Law School, New York University Law School, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University, and has served as a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. She has served as an Independent Trustee of the Eaton Vance Mutual Funds since 1998 and on the Advisory Board of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program since 2009. Starting in 2014 Stout also serves on the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Research Advisory Committee and on the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute. She was also named one of the 100 Most Influential People In Business Ethics in 2014 by the Ethisphere Institute.

In 2012, Stout elected to leave the UCLA faculty and joined Cornell Law School after UCLA accepted a $10 million donation from Lowell Milken to create a "Lowell Milken Business Law and Policy Institute." Stout expressed ethical concerns about UCLA's decision to name a business law center after Lowell Milken in light of the fact that Lowell Milken had been banned from the securities industry and barred from the New York Stock Exchange.

The importance of human conscience to peace, prosperity, and the rule of law

Stout is one of the first to apply the scientific evidence on unselfish prosocial behavior (“conscience”) to our understanding of how legal rules shape behavior. Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton University Press, 2011) critiques the “homo economicus” assumption of rational selfishness and surveys behavioral science evidence demonstrating how and when people sacrifice their own material welfare to help or to avoid harming others. It applies the lessons of behavioral science to the questions of how tort, contract, and criminal law rules shape behavior, and suggests how to use law and rules more effectively by recruiting the force of conscience, not just material incentives, to encourage cooperative, ethical, and law-abiding behavior. Stout has also published articles on the importance of unselfish prosocial behavior in analyzing judicial behavior, corporate boards, and corporate and securities law.

Team Production Theory and other challenges to "shareholder primacy"

With her co-author economist Margaret Blair, Stout has proposed a “team production” theory of the corporation that posits that corporate boards enjoy a broad range of discretion in setting corporate policy and allocating corporate surplus because they are in the best position to preserve and protect important firm-specific investments of not only shareholders, but also creditors, employees, and the larger community. Stout’s and Blair’s team production model was cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stevens in his dissenting opinion in Citizens United v. FEC. This article is also among the most cited Corporate and Securities Law law review articles of all time.

Stout has also published numerous other articles on the empirical and theoretical weakness in the “shareholder primacy” view that corporations should be run to maximize shareholder wealth as measured by share price. Her most recent book, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Corporations First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, addressed the hazards of pursuing shareholder value. The Media Consortium named this book "one of the five most impactful stories in 2012" and it was named by Directors & Boards Magazine as the 2012 Governance Book of the Year.

Selected books

Selected scholarly publications