Bernard S. Sharfman is a Senior Corporate Governance Fellow with the RealClearFoundation, a research fellow with the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, and a member of the Journal of Corporation Law's editorial advisory board.
Mr. Sharfman has written extensively on corporate law and governance. His recent writings have included:
Opportunism in the Shareholder Voting and Engagement of the ‘Big Three’ Investment Advisers to Index Funds (forthcoming, Journal of Corporation Law); The Illusion of Success: A Critique of Engine No. 1's Proxy Fight at ExxonMobil (Harvard Business Law Review Online 2022); How Discretionary Decision-Making Impacts the Financial Performance and Legal Disclosures of S&P 500 Funds (with Vincent Deluard, Director of Market Research, StoneX; forthcoming, Brooklyn Law Review 2022); Liberating the Market for Corporate Control (with Marc T. Moore; Berkeley Business Law Journal 2021); ESG Investing Under ERISA (Yale Journal on Regulation Online (2020)); The Risks and Rewards of Shareholder Voting (SMU Law Review 2020); Now is the Time to Designate Proxy Advisors as Fiduciaries under ERISA (Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance 2019); The Undesirability of Mandatory Time-Based Sunsets in Dual Class Share Structures: A Reply to Bebchuk and Kastiel (Southern California Law Rev. Postscript 2019); Enhancing the Value of Shareholder Voting Recommendations (Tennessee Law Review); A Private Ordering Defense of a Company’s Right to Use Dual Class Share Structures in IPOs, (Villanova Law Review 2018); The Importance of the Business Judgment Rule (New York University Journal of Law & Business 2018); Shareholder Activism as a Corrective Mechanism in Corporate Governance (with Paul Rose; Brigham Young University Law Review 2015); Activist Hedge Funds in a World of Board Independence: Creators or Destroyers of Long-Term Value? (Columbia Business Law Review 2016); and A Theory of Shareholder Activism as its Place in Corporate Law (Tennessee Law Review 2016).
Mr. Sharfman has peer reviewed articles for the Stanford Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Mr. Sharfman has written a number of comment letters to the SEC, NASDAQ, Department of Labor, and the New York Stock Exchange and his blog posts can be found on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Columbia Law School's Blue Sky Blog, the Oxford Business Law Blog, the University of Chicago Business Law Review Blog, and Duke Law School's FinReg Blog.
Mr. Sharfman has practiced corporate and securities law and is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center (J.D., 2000). At Georgetown, he was an Executive Editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics and a recipient of the journal's Saint Thomas More Award.
