About

A research initiative on the law and economics of corporate governance.

SMU CGI is the empirical and doctrinal research program at SMU studying corporate law, capital markets, courts, and governance institutions — primary sources, replication kits, source-first discipline.

The Initiative

SMU CGI is a cross-disciplinary research program at SMU Cox School of Business and SMU Dedman School of Law, built to pair empirical finance methods with doctrinal analysis of the law and economics of corporate governance.

How these counts relate. Affiliated scholars are individually listed on the Scholars page. The ten research verticals (V01–V10) are SMU CGI research programs. The four live publications are the recurring SMU CGI-edited products — The Reincorporation Index, The TBC Codex, the Live Case Monitor, and The Hilltop Docket. The Hilltop Forum and other venues listed below are imprints and outlets where affiliated scholars publish — they are surfaces, not SMU CGI publications.

The SMU Corporate Governance Initiative is a research program at Southern Methodist University on the law and economics of corporate governance. Based jointly at the Cox School of Business and the Dedman School of Law, SMU CGI is the institutional home for affiliated scholars whose research pairs empirical methods from finance — event studies, synthetic-control analysis, and pre-specified empirical designs where applicable — with doctrinal analysis of statutes, regulations, and court opinions. Their work examines how state corporate-law competition shapes firm decisions, shareholder outcomes, and the broader market for governance.

Authorship and attribution. SMU CGI is the research platform; individual scholars are the authors. Legal conclusions, empirical findings, and interpretive claims belong to the named authors, editors, or contributors on each page. Affiliated scholars publish in their own names; SMU CGI hosts, organizes, and links to that work, but the work should be cited to the identified scholar. Individual scholars and their publications are listed on the Scholars page.

Affiliated scholars publish working papers, law-review articles, and shorter pieces in the CLS Blue Sky Blog, the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Bloomberg Law, Fortune, the Texas Lawbook, Law360, the Oxford Business Law Blog, and the SMU Cox Hilltop Forum. Datasets and replication kits accompany results so that any reader can re-run the work.

Research discipline. Empirical claims published under SMU CGI identify the source record — SEC filing, court opinion, enrolled statute, or dataset row — not a practitioner blog or news aggregator. Working papers ship with versioned replication code, primary-source citations, and pre-specified designs where applicable. Citations follow The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020); periodical names are italicized and every named work links to its primary source. Corrections, when warranted, are posted as standalone dated memos and linked from the affected page.

Independence. SMU CGI is institutionally independent. Research questions, methods, findings, and timing of publication are determined solely by the identified authors and editors. Where an affiliated scholar has a professional, advisory, or financial relationship that bears materially on a published piece, that relationship is disclosed on the first page of the piece and on the scholar's bio. Interpretations are the authors' own and do not represent positions of Southern Methodist University, the Cox School of Business, or the Dedman School of Law. Nothing on this site is legal, investment, voting, or fiduciary advice.

For media, speaking, research collaboration, or data inquiries, see the Executive Director card on this page.

Research methods & AI tooling

Research-assistant tooling. SMU CGI uses AI assistance at several stages of research production: structured extraction of data from court opinions and SEC filings, citation verification, draft-language refinement, statutory comparison, and inline-SVG visualization. Frontier-model research-assistant tools are used routinely; specific model families, vendors, and date ranges are disclosed on each scholarly publication when material to the research record. AI is treated as a research-assistant tool, comparable to a citation-checking script or a data-cleaning pipeline. It is not an author and does not exercise editorial judgment.

Editorial chain of custody. Factual claims, citations, and scholarly arguments are reviewed against source records before publication; items pending verification are labeled or held from public-facing copy. Final editorial responsibility rests with the named author of each piece (for scholarly publications) or with the Executive Director (for institutional pages and the home page).

Scholar pieces. Individual scholars publishing under their own byline retain full editorial discretion over AI use within their own work. The Initiative does not impose a uniform AI-use policy on scholar authorship.

Hyperlink discipline. Every primary-source claim links to the underlying statute, court opinion, SEC filing, or dataset. Practitioner commentary may appear as secondary analysis but never as the primary citation target.

Citation standard

Citations on every SMU CGI surface — the Reincorporation Index, the Texas Business Court Codex, the Live Case Monitor, the Hilltop Docket, the Hilltop Forum, scholar bios, and all working papers — conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020). Periodical names are italicized; case names follow Table T6 abbreviation conventions; statutory cites use the official Texas, Delaware, or federal codification; and SEC filings cite the EDGAR accession number with a resolvable URL.

Contact

For media inquiries, speaking engagements, research collaboration, dataset access, or scholar-affiliation inquiries, please contact the Executive Director:

Shane Goodwin, Ph.D., LL.M.
Executive Director, SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
SMU Cox School of Business · SMU Dedman School of Law
6425 Boaz Lane, Dallas, Texas 75205
sgoodwin@smu.edu

Method · Standing rules

The Initiative's operating principles.

Every empirical claim, every doctrinal interpretation, every dataset published under SMU CGI is held to the same evidentiary discipline — the same standard the Initiative applies to scholar-authored work and to institutional pages.

  1. 01

    Primary-source-first; fallback sources labeled.

  2. 02

    Bluebook (21st ed. 2020) throughout.

  3. 03

    Cross-disciplinary — finance · law.

How the Initiative works

The engine and the verticals.

SMU CGI pairs empirical finance methods at SMU Cox with doctrinal legal analysis at SMU Dedman. The ten research verticals are the SMU CGI research programs that draw on both pillars. The mix below is the editorial weighting of method emphasis per vertical; the source-of-record for each vertical lives on its Research index page.

FIGURE 1 · CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ENGINE

SMU Cox finance methods + SMU Dedman law methods → ten research verticals

Tap any method to see three readings — plain English, a worked example, and the academic method. The mini-bar on each vertical is an editorial navigation weight (finance vs. law emphasis), not a measured share of research.

Finance emphasis Doctrinal-law emphasis Editorial navigation weights, not measured shares.
Figure 1. Cross-disciplinary engine. The SMU Cox finance methods (left) and SMU Dedman law methods (right) feed the ten SMU CGI research verticals (center). Each vertical carries a mini-bar of its finance/doctrine emphasis. Pillars are illustrative of the dominant methods used across the corpus, not exhaustive; mini-bars are editorial navigation weights, not measured shares.

FIGURE 2 · VERTICAL METHOD MAP

Research verticals · primary-source emphasis · finance-vs-doctrine mix · status

Each row links to that vertical's page. Tap a row for three readings. The finance / law bar and the partition counts below are editorial navigation weights, not measured shares of research labor, citations, or evidentiary weight.

Ten research verticals · rendered from _data/verticals.json
ID Vertical & reader question Primary-source emphasis Finance / law Status
The vertical method map renders interactively. See the Research index for the canonical list of ten verticals and their source-of-record.
Figure 2. Vertical method map. Each row identifies a research vertical, a reader-facing question, its primary-source emphasis, the finance-vs-doctrine mix, and current status, and links to the vertical's page. The Research index carries the canonical record set. Method-mix weights are editorial classifications for navigation, not measured shares of research labor, citation count, or evidentiary weight.