About
Public-company corporate law is reorganizing in real time. SMU CGI is the empirical and doctrinal research program built to follow that moment closely — primary sources, replication kits, source-first discipline.
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-registered hypothesis tests — 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 Columbia Law School 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. Every empirical claim published under SMU CGI cites the underlying 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-registered designs where applicable. Citations follow Bluebook (21st ed.) discipline; 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-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. 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. Every factual claim, every citation, and every scholarly argument is verified by SMU CGI faculty before publication. 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.
