Pollack Center for Law and Business
The Center for Law & Business is a unique shared venture between the New York University School of Law and the Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The Center is designed to enrich the professional education of students of law and business and to facilitate joint teaching to involve leaders in banking, business, and law in the intellectual life of the University through sponsorship of meetings, conferences and dinners.
The Director of the Center is William T. Allen who, before joining the faculties of both the law school and the business school in the fall of 1997, served as Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery (a court most often referred to as “the Supreme Court of corporate law”). Chancellor Allen chose NYU School of Law after being courted by other top law schools because, as he explained, “New York is the nation’s financial and legal center, and NYU is becoming a preeminent center for scholarship and teaching in those areas.”
The Center brings together law students and business students in the classrooms of both schools. Business school classes that have been open to law students include:
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Global Banking and Capital Markets
- Investment Banking
- Bankruptcy and Reorganization
- Entrepreneurial Finance
- Real Estate Finance
- Restructuring Firms and Industries
- Project and Structured Finance
- Venture Capital Financing
Law students get law school credit for these courses, as well as for others that are approved on an individual basis.
The Center also sponsors two seminar series each year. In the fall semester, the Corporate Law Colloquium is held in the law school, and in the spring semester the Law and Finance Seminar Series is held in the Finance department of the Stern School. With a different emphasis, each of these seminars focuses on issues arising out of the legal institutions that structure the economy. Market regulation, corporate governance and finance, and issues of transaction contracting fall within the purview of these seminars. The seminars are a forum for the presentation of papers by leading law and business professors from NYU and other universities. Faculty members, students, and practitioners that attend these presentations discuss and comment upon papers at the pre-publication stage, thus having an opportunity to shape current thinking on the topic at hand.
In addition, the Center sponsors Speaker Series luncheons throughout the school year featuring leading figures in business and law to address and interact with the students. The student luncheon series is co-sponsored by the Wall Street Barristers group, an organization of students of NYU School of Law who have an interest in business law. Past speakers have included Joseph Flom, Senior Partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; Martin Lipton, Partner of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Michael Fricklas, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of Viacom, Inc.; and Dr. Henry Kaufman, founder of Henry Kaufman & Co. and Chairman Emeritus of the Stern School of Business.
The Center’s Web site is located at www.stern.nyu.edu/clb.
Contact Harold Jennings, Program Coordinator, at (212) 998-0565 or at hjenning@stern.nyu.edu for more information about upcoming Center events.