Southern Methodist University · Dallas, Texas

Research at the intersection of law and economics.

Corporate governance research combining empirical methods from finance with doctrinal analysis from corporate law.

Executive Director
Shane Goodwin, PhD, LL.M.
Affiliations
SMU Cox · SMU Dedman Law
Faculty
Faculty and affiliated scholars

10 research programs across the corporate-governance landscape.

SMU’s corporate-governance research combines empirical finance, corporate-law doctrine, SEC filing analysis, court monitoring, and primary-source statutory research. Our live research products track the legal, financial, and boardroom consequences of jurisdictional competition, Texas corporate-law reform, fiduciary-duty doctrine, shareholder litigation, corporate purpose, and governance risk.

Primary-source-first research. Legal, filing, statutory, and empirical claims are source-status labeled, with primary sources controlling where available.

  • 10 Research programs
  • 99 TBC opinions cataloged
  • $2.8T Combined market value · tracked movers
  • 5 SMU faculty

LATEST FROM THE REINCORPORATION INDEX

Post-Tornetta reincorporation cohort.

Since Tornetta v. Musk, 310 A.3d 430 (Del. Ch. 2024), rev’d sub nom. In re Tesla, Inc. Derivative Litig., Nos. 534, 2024; 10, 2025; 11, 2025; 12, 2025, 2025 Del. LEXIS 492 (Del. Dec. 19, 2025) (per curiam) (reversing rescission of Musk’s 2018 performance award; remanding for fees on a quantum meruit basis with a 4× lodestar multiplier, reducing the fee award from approximately $345M to approximately $54M), SMU has tracked 81 public-company reincorporation transactions, including Delaware-outbound moves to Texas and Nevada and selected comparator transactions for empirical analysis. ExxonMobil’s New Jersey → Texas redomestication, approved May 27, 2026, is the most recent S&P 100 transaction in the cohort.

View the Reincorporation Index

Source-first research

Legal claims link to statutes, court opinions, and SEC filings. Empirical claims link to datasets. Practitioner commentary, scholarship, and SSRN drafts are labeled by source status and treated as secondary to controlling primary sources.

Live data · computed from canonical feeds at page load

Reincorporation Indexchecking… TBC Codexchecking… Last build

Where corporate charters are moving — and where the value is.

Loading live migration flows…

Source: SMU CGI Reincorporation Index (public_firms.json, panel-B movers), hydrated live at page load. Ribbon width is the selected metric’s share of total cohort flow; counterflow to Delaware is shown where present. Hover any ribbon for firm count and aggregate market value.

Research verticals

10 research programs across the corporate-governance landscape.

Each vertical is an active research program. Some are datasets with replication kits; others are doctrinal primers, historical essays, or live regulatory trackers.

Active research

Vertical 01 Live

The Reincorporation Index

Public-company state-of-incorporation changes and selected comparator rows tracked since the Tesla stockholder vote of June 13, 2024. For each firm: the vote tally, the proxy filings, the market reaction, and a per-firm replication kit. The dataset also carries a reference panel of Texas-incumbent companies for comparison. ExxonMobil’s New Jersey to Texas move, approved May 27, 2026, is the most recent S&P 100 transaction in the cohort.

Firms tracked 81
Open the Index
Vertical 02 Live

Texas Corporate Law (TBOC)

What changed in Texas corporate law during the 2024–2026 reform cycle, and what it means for boards and shareholders. Texas sets a 3% statutory ceiling under Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code § 21.552 on the derivative-standing ownership threshold a corporation may set in its charter or bylaws — a cap, not a default. The reform package also includes the codified business-judgment rule (§ 21.419), the shareholder-proposal submission rules (§ 21.373), the special-committee independence procedure for controller transactions (§§ 21.416(g), 21.4161), and Texas forum-selection provisions for internal entity claims (§ 2.115). Each rule is paired with a plain-English explainer and the first cases applying it. The full Texas Business Organizations Code is linked throughout.

Format Statutory guide
Read the guide
Vertical 03 Live

The Texas Business Court Codex

Every opinion the Texas Business Court has issued since it opened on September 1, 2024 (operating under Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 25A as enacted by H.B. 19, 88th Leg., R.S. (2023)), in an interactive dashboard. Filter by division, posture, disposition, doctrine, or judge. Each opinion links to the court’s PDF and to a short editorial summary; the opinion text controls. The Codex also tracks the jurisdictional-threshold rulings — the cases that decide whether a dispute belongs in the Business Court at all — and the legislative changes that govern the court’s reach.

Opinions cataloged 99
Open the Codex
Vertical 04 Live

Corporate Governance — Foundations

The doctrinal foundation underneath every other vertical. Plain-English coverage of the fiduciary duties of directors and officers, the business-judgment rule, controlling-shareholder doctrine, and the board-and-committee architecture that governs U.S. public companies. Every operative case, statute, and SEC release cited in the primer is linked to its primary source. Start here if you are new to corporate governance, or if you want a clean refresher before reading the rest of the site.

Format Reference primer
Read the primer
Vertical 05 Live

Corporate Law History

How state corporate law got to where it is today. A century of competition between chartering states — Delaware’s rise to dominance, the race-to-the-top and race-to-the-bottom debate, the internal-affairs doctrine that makes choice of state matter, and the Texas reforms of 2024–2026, which have produced the largest cohort of state-of-incorporation changes since the New Jersey → Delaware migration of the early 20th century. Eight phases from 1899 through 2026, told as a narrative with primary-source links at every turn.

Format Historical essay
Read the essay
Vertical 06 Live

Proxy Advisors

What ISS and Glass Lewis recommend, how often shareholders follow them, and the expanding regulatory and litigation regime governing proxy advisors. Coverage spans director elections, say-on-pay, M&A, and bylaw and charter amendments, with dissent-rate trackers and methodology benchmarks for each. A three-line conflict-of-interest taxonomy maps the issuer-paid-consulting line, the recommendation-conflict line, and the new Texas DTPA theory raised in the May 2026 petition. The regulation-and-litigation layer is live; the empirical layers are rolling.

Format Regulatory and empirical tracker
Read the overview
Vertical 07 Live

Shareholder Franchise & Private Ordering

Who actually decides what at a public company — and how the allocation of decision rights has changed between 2024 and 2026. 8 governance channels covered: shareholder proposals, the precatory-proposal doctrine, the SEC’s Staff Legal Bulletin No. 14M (Feb. 12, 2025) (reframing Rule 14a-8’s ordinary-business and significance exclusions) and the subsequent Division of Corporation Finance statement (Nov. 17, 2025) (the Division stepped out of no-action review for the current proxy season), exempt solicitations, retail auto-voting, proxy-advisor regulation, mandatory arbitration, and the litigation over whether a company can exclude a proposal at all. Texas, Delaware, and company-level private ordering are compared throughout.

Streams 8 active
Open the vertical
Vertical 08 Live

Statutory Reform

Where state legislatures took corporate law between 2024 and 2026, and where they did not. Delaware codified the controller and conflicted-director safe harbors and narrowed the books-and-records inspection right; the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the SB 21 safe-harbor amendments in Rutledge v. Clearway Energy Grp., LLC, No. 248, 2025 (Del. Feb. 27, 2026), rejecting jurisdiction-stripping and retroactivity challenges and leaving safe-harbor compliance for the Court of Chancery to decide case by case. Nevada codified a narrow controlling-stockholder duty. Texas enacted the most extensive reform package among the three jurisdictions tracked here — covered separately in the Texas vertical. Federal action lives at the SEC, on Rule 14a-8 guidance and 13D/G phase-in.

Format Statutory tracker
Read the overview
Vertical 09 Live

Purpose of a Corporation

A century of debate over the same question: who is the corporation for? Dodge v. Ford in 1919, the Berle–Dodd exchange in the 1930s, the Friedman doctrine in 1970, the Business Roundtable statements of 1997 and 2019, the Bebchuk and Tallarita audit finding limited follow-through on the 2019 statement, and the 2025 statutory reforms in Delaware and Texas that altered the default standards of review. An interactive timeline, a state-by-state map of constituency statutes — adopted by a majority of U.S. states, though not Delaware — and the shareholder-primacy and stakeholder-governance theories side by side.

Format Reference primer
Read the primer
Vertical 10 Live

Legal & Litigation Risk

A side-by-side comparison of Delaware, Texas, Nevada, and New Jersey corporate law across the doctrines that drive litigation outcomes — Caremark oversight, MFW cleansing, Revlon scrutiny, derivative-suit standing, books-and-records access, and appraisal rights. Designed for the practitioner who has to advise a board on where to incorporate, or to defend or challenge a redomestication. Includes a three-lane plaintiff/defense playbook and a close read of Maffei v. Palkon, 311 A.3d 255 (Del. 2024).

Format Comparative analysis
Read the analysis

Publications

Recent research outputs.

Working papers, law-review articles, books, and commentary from SMU CGI faculty over the past twelve months. Listed chronologically, newest first; click any title to open the source. Every entry has been independently verified against its primary venue (byline, date, and title) before listing.

Forthcoming 2025

TikTok Family Matters

Carliss N. Chatman

49 Seattle U. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2025) · SSRN abstract id=5243494

Corporate-personhood and family-business framing applied to the TikTok divestiture episode.

Forthcoming

The 2024-26 Reincorporation Wave: A Cohort Event Study Across 118 U.S. Public Firms

SMU CGI working paper

Working paper, SMU Corporate Governance Initiative

Cohort-level event study of the post-Tornetta reincorporation wave, with cross-sectional analysis of controller ownership concentration, dual-class structure, and exchange-listing variation.

In preparation
2026

1981

Carliss N. Chatman

82 Washington and Lee Law Review 1655 (2026)

Argues 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (Civil Rights Act of 1866) fails to secure equal contracting rights for Black contracting parties amid DEI retrenchment; combines law-and-economics analysis with interest-convergence theory.

May 21, 2026

ExxonMobil's Planned Domicile Change Is a Test of the Leopard Paradigm

Christina M. Sautter

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog

Applies the Leopard Paradigm to the ExxonMobil redomiciliation; argues formal shareholder rights can be preserved while practical shareholder power is restructured.

May 13, 2026

Read the Fine Print: What ExxonMobil's Proxy Actually Says About Texas Redomiciliation

Shane Goodwin

SMU Cox Hilltop Forum

Reads the NJ → TX redomiciliation proxy through an 18-specification event-study battery; argues critics misread the disclosure.

May 5, 2026

What ExxonMobil's Proxy Actually Says About the Change of Domicile to Texas

Shane Goodwin

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog · cited by ExxonMobil in its DEFA14A solicitation

CLS Blue Sky version of the Hilltop Forum essay; the company's DEFA14A directs investors to this piece.

April 28, 2026

Exxon's Retail Voting Program Is A Trap For Retail Investors

Christina M. Sautter

Law360 paywall

Argues ExxonMobil's retail voting program functions as an entrenchment device; cited in SEC filings on the redomiciliation proposal.

April 22, 2026

Texas Diversity Contracting Pullback Gives Firms Whiplash

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (Good Counsel) paywall

On the Texas Historically Underutilized Business Program rollback and the compliance confusion it creates for federal contractors.

April 6, 2026

DExit Debate Flattens the Constituencies That Boards Balance

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (Good Counsel) paywall

Argues both pro- and anti-Delaware camps misread the board's multi-constituency role; charter choice is business judgment, not a governance proxy.

March 31, 2026

The Texas Reincorporation Trap — What the ExxonMobil Vote Reveals About Board Power

Christina M. Sautter

The Texas Lawbook

Texas-audience version of the Bloomberg Law thesis; argues TBOC § 21.373 / § 21.552 enable post-vote board override by bylaw.

March 20, 2026

Exxon Texas Move Should Prompt Shareholders to Read Fine Print

Christina M. Sautter

Bloomberg Law (Legal Exchange) paywall

Argues the ExxonMobil TX move is "corporate disenfranchisement by design"; develops the Leopard Paradigm framing.

March 5, 2026

Texas Proxy Adviser Law Demands Disclosure and Protects Investors

Shane Goodwin

Bloomberg Law (Legal Exchange) paywall

Defends Texas SB 2337 (regulating proxy advisory firms) as a disclosure-based investor protection measure; argues proxy advisers exercising delegated fiduciary power must be transparent about non-pecuniary analytical frameworks.

February 23, 2026

A Paradigm for Understanding Shareholder Disenfranchisement

Sergio A. Gramitto Ricci · with Christina M. Sautter

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog

Introduces the "Leopard Paradigm" framework that anchors the later May 21 follow-up.

February 21, 2026

Corporate Disenfranchisement

Sergio A. Gramitto Ricci · with Christina M. Sautter

ECGI Law Working Paper No. 902/2026 · forthcoming 17 U.C. Irvine Law Review

Develops the "rights–powers gap" framework — the core theoretical apparatus behind the Leopard Paradigm.

February 19, 2026

Corporate Governance and Business & Human Rights

Carliss N. Chatman · with Erika R. George

Submission to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (OHCHR)

Co-authored submission to OHCHR's call for inputs for the 81st-session General Assembly report; argues U.S. state corporate law creates structural misalignment with the UN Guiding Principles.

February 17, 2026

Corporate DEI Hindered By Threats and Probes — Not Rules or Cases

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (Good Counsel) paywall

On the structural-vs-rhetorical drivers of DEI rollback in corporate practice.

January 8, 2026

Tesla's Vote Wasn't About Pay. It Was About Who Really Runs the Company

Shane Goodwin

Fortune (Commentary)

Argues Tesla's 2025 Annual Meeting demonstrated a shareholder rejection of proxy-advisor dominance; investors made independent judgments on the Amended and Restated 2019 Equity Incentive Plan rather than deferring to ISS/Glass Lewis.

January 6, 2026

Texas Corporate Reforms Silence Retail Shareholders — By Design

Christina M. Sautter

Bloomberg Law (Legal Exchange) paywall

Critique of SB 1057 / SB 29 ownership thresholds as structural disenfranchisement of retail shareholders.

2025

Texas, Delaware, and the New Controller Primacy

Christine Hurt

67 Arizona Law Review 693 (2025)

Argues the Tesla DE → TX move, followed by Trade Desk, Meta, TMTG, and others, is establishing a new "controller primacy" doctrine distinct from shareholder primacy.

2025

The Contractarian Joint Venture

Christine Hurt · with Carla L. Reyes (SMU Dedman School of Law)

76 Alabama Law Review 741 (2025)

Argues recent Delaware joint-venture case law enables purely-contractual entity structures — a possible risk-mitigation route for DAOs.

2025 (6th ed.)

Lawyering and Ethics for the Business Attorney

Marc I. Steinberg

West Academic Press (6th ed. 2025)

Sixth edition of Steinberg's casebook on attorney ethics and professional responsibility in the business-law context; adds chapters on insider-trading compliance and malpractice avoidance.

2025–26 ed.

Securities Practice: Federal and State Enforcement

Marc I. Steinberg · with Ralph C. Ferrara

Thomson Reuters (annual treatise)

Annual practitioner treatise update covering federal and state securities enforcement.

2025

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Based on Deficient Disclosure — Practices, Policies, and Insights

Marc I. Steinberg

50 Journal of Corporation Law 943 (2025) · 50th Anniversary Commemorative Issue

Empirical and doctrinal study of SEC enforcement actions involving deficient disclosure practices; examines the gap between the disclosure mandate and actual enforcement posture.

2025

Unflexed Muscle: SEC Enforcement and Officer SOX 302 Certifications

Marc I. Steinberg · with A.B. Steinberg

80 University of Miami Law Review 1 (2025)

Empirical critique of under-enforcement of Sarbanes-Oxley § 302 officer-certification obligations.

December 8, 2025

Teaching Tomorrow's Lawyers to Think About AI Before They Use It

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (Good Counsel) paywall

On AI-in-legal-practice pedagogy; cites State Bar of Texas Ethics Opinion 705.

November 20, 2025

A New Era for Business Litigation: What Lensabl Signals About Texas's Corporate Jurisdiction

Shane Goodwin

SMU Cox Hilltop Forum

Analyzes the Texas Business Court's ruling in Lensabl, Inc. v. RBH SPE One, LLC; argues the court's strict statutory veil-piercing standard under Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code § 21.223 positions Texas as a credible rival to Delaware.

November 13, 2025

Tesla Shareholders Show How Far Law Will Go to Protect the Board

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (Good Counsel) paywall

On the Tornetta sequel and board-protective doctrine; argues Tesla's Texas reincorporation under SB 29 tests how completely states can subordinate shareholders to management.

October 20, 2025

Texas, Delaware, and the New Controller Primacy

Christine Hurt

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog

Practitioner-facing companion to the Arizona Law Review article.

October 14, 2025

I Advised Tesla's Special Committee on Elon Musk's Historic Incentive Compensation Package. Most Critics Are Missing the Point

Shane Goodwin

Fortune (Commentary) · attached as Exhibit 6 to Tesla's DEFA14A on EDGAR

First-person commentary from inside the Tesla Special Committee compensation-package process, defending the construct of the proposed Musk performance award as best-in-class governance under Texas law.

July 17, 2025

Corporate Directors and Officers Are "Discretionaries" — Not Fiduciaries

Marc I. Steinberg

Oxford Business Law Blog

International-audience companion to the Harvard Forum post; engages the U.K./Commonwealth fiduciary tradition.

July 10, 2025

Shareholder Democracy Is a Corporate Governance Myth That Won't Die

Christina M. Sautter · with Sergio A. Gramitto Ricci & Daniel J.H. Greenwood

Oxford Business Law Blog

Practitioner-facing condensation of The Shareholder Democracy Lie (78 Fla. L. Rev., forthcoming 2026).

June 30, 2025

Compliance and Reputation in the Era of Interconnected Stakeholders

Sergio A. Gramitto Ricci · with Christina M. Sautter

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog

Introduces the "Total Governance" stakeholder-interconnection model.

June 26, 2025

Corporate Director and Officer Liability — "Discretionaries" Not Fiduciaries

Marc I. Steinberg

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance · Delaware law series

Argues standard fiduciary characterization fails to match the lenient liability standards (BJR, exculpation, gross-negligence threshold) and proposes the neutral substantive term "discretionary."

June 23, 2025

Delaware's SB21 Continues 150 Years of Corporate Power and Regulatory Capture

Christina M. Sautter

ProMarket (Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth)

Frames Delaware SB21 as the latest cycle of a 150-year regulatory-capture pattern in U.S. corporate-law competition.

June 27, 2025

Corporate Director and Officer Liability: "Discretionaries" Not Fiduciaries

Marc I. Steinberg

Oxford University Press (monograph)

First monograph to challenge the fiduciary characterization of corporate directors and officers; analyzes Delaware and Texas statutory amendments as confirming the recharacterization.

June 5, 2025

Justice Jackson Warns Timing Rules Shield Systemic Workplace Bias

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (US Law Week) paywall

Analyzes Justice Jackson's dissent in Nicholson v. W.L. York, Inc. on § 1981 statute-of-limitations doctrine.

May 29, 2025

How Texas Is Rewriting the Rules of Corporate Domiciles

Shane Goodwin

Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog

Explains SB 29 as Texas's structural answer to the Delaware-DExit question.

May 22, 2025

DEI Rollbacks Create Legal, Governance Risks Under Section 1981

Carliss N. Chatman

Bloomberg Law (US Law Week) paywall

Argues federal contractors abandoning DEI commitments to avoid regulatory scrutiny may expose themselves to § 1981 liability.

Winter 2025

The Texas Two-Step: Rewriting the Rules in the Battle for Corporate Domicile

Shane Goodwin

53 Securities Regulation Law Journal No. 4, art. 1

Traces the NJ → DE corporate-charter migration as historical analogue to the emerging Texas challenge.

Events & convenings

Convening corporate-governance research at SMU.

SMU CGI hosts an annual forum and a Spring conference focused on the intersection of corporate law, capital markets, and empirical research.

Annual forum

Hilltop Forum

SMU Cox's signature annual gathering on corporate governance and capital markets, hosted by Shane Goodwin. Brings together academics, regulators, institutional investors, and corporate practitioners around the year's most pressing governance questions.

Forum & registration →

Spring 2026

SMU Capital Markets Conference

A research conference convening empirical corporate-finance and corporate-governance work in progress, with sessions on state competition, shareholder activism, and the evolving role of proxy advisors.

Details & program →

About

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

The SMU Corporate Governance Initiative is a research program based jointly at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business and Dedman School of Law. Our work combines empirical methods from finance with doctrinal analysis from corporate law to examine how state corporate-law competition shapes firm decisions, shareholder outcomes, and the broader market for governance.

The Initiative publishes working papers, law-review articles, and shorter pieces in venues such as the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog and the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Our datasets and replication kits are open and re-runnable. All research is published under the SMU CGI imprint with full source code, primary citations, and pre-registration discipline.

The Initiative is independent: all interpretations are the authors' own and do not represent the positions of Southern Methodist University or any of its schools.

METHOD · STANDING RULES

Four standing rules

The Initiative writes for legal scholars, finance scholars, and serious practitioners. We hold every page to the same evidentiary discipline.

  1. 01

    Primary-source-first; fallback sources labeled.

    SEC EDGAR filings (8-K Item 5.07, DEF 14A, S-4), court opinions on official court servers, enacted statutes from Texas Legislature Online, certificates of incorporation. No practitioner blogs as authority.

  2. 02

    Bluebook 21st throughout.

    Cases, statutes, regulations, law-review articles follow Bluebook 21st-edition form. The reincorporation registry carries Bluebook short-form citations on every row.

  3. 03

    One source of truth.

    Each research product is anchored to a single canonical data file that the research team builds and maintains by reading primary documents directly — SEC EDGAR filings, state Secretary-of-State certificates of incorporation and conversion, court opinions and dockets, and enacted statutory text. The Reincorporation Index emits data.json; the Texas Business Court Codex emits tbc_opinions.json. Every number on the site — firm counts, market-cap totals, KPI tiles, chart axes, prose statements — is computed from those canonical files at deploy time. One source for each datum, propagated to every page on every build.

  4. 04

    Source-linked on every row.

    Every firm row in the Index links to its SEC EDGAR filing; every TBC opinion links to the court's PDF; every cited paper links to its DOI, SSRN ID, or open-access PDF. Hyperlinks validated on every deploy.