NEW YORK, November 16, 2015: Stanford Professor and former US Securities and Exchange Commissioner Joseph A. Grundfest will deliver the Sixteenth Annual A.A. Sommer, Jr. Lecture on Corporate, Securities & Financial Law on Wednesday, November 18. The lecture, “Is the SEC Afraid of Federal Juries and Judges? An Empirical Analysis and a Legislative Recommendation,” will be hosted by the Fordham Corporate Law Center and sponsored by Morgan Lewis. The event will be free and open to the public. It will take place at 6:30 p.m. at Fordham Law School, 150 West 62nd Street, in New York City.
The Hon. Joseph A. Grundfest is a nationally prominent expert on capital markets, corporate governance, and securities litigation. His scholarship has been published in the Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law reviews, and he has been recognized as one of the most influential attorneys in the United States. A senior faculty member of Stanford Law School’s Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance since 1990, he was appointed to the US Securities and Exchange Commission by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He served on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors as counsel and senior economist for legal and regulatory matters, and was an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. Early in his career he was a research associate at the Brookings Institution and an economist and consultant with the RAND Corporation. He is also a co-founder and director of Financial Engines Inc. and chair of the audit committee at KKR LLC, both of which are publicly traded entities.
The A.A. Sommer, Jr. Lecture was established by Morgan Lewis and Fordham Law School in 2000 to honor former Morgan Lewis partner Al Sommer, who served as SEC commissioner and chairman of the Public Oversight Board of the American Institute of CPAs. Mr. Sommer established Morgan Lewis’s Securities practice, which regularly represents public and private companies, financial institutions, officers, directors, and board committees in regulatory matters and investigations. The lecture series is one of Fordham Corporate Law Center's most significant and influential programs and provides a forum for leading regulators and policy-makers to share insights into critical issues confronting global financial markets with Fordham University School of Law's students, faculty and the broader legal community.