Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Corporate Law & Policy at Columbia Law School, where his research emphasizes empirical study of corporate governance and financial markets. Before joining the faculty in 2010, Professor Jackson served as an advisor to senior officials at the Department of the Treasury and in the Office of the Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation. Before that, Professor Jackson practiced in the Executive Compensation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz.
Professor Jackson has testified about his work before the U.S. Senate, and his research has been the subject of rulemaking commentary before several federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. His most recent projects include the first study to examine the time delays of corporate filings posted to the SEC’s EDGAR website, its FTP server, and the PDF subscription service, the first study of the effect of mandatory disclosures required by the JOBS Act on trading by individual investors, the first empirical study of incentives throughout the managerial hierarchy of a large investment bank (Stock Unloading and Banker Incentives, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 951 (2012)) and the first comprehensive study of CEO pay in firms owned by private equity (Private Equity and Executive Compensation, 60 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 638 (2013)). Professor Jackson has also written about corporate spending on politics (Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides?, 124 Harv. L. Rev. 83 (2010) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk)), and co-chaired a group of legal academics that has petitioned the SEC to make rules requiring U.S. public companies to disclose such spending.
In 2012, Columbia students honored Professor Jackson with the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Also in 2012, Professor Jackson moderated a Fred Friendly Seminar on Financial Innovation in conjunction with Columbia Business School.
Recent papers are available here. Recent policy advocacy is available here.
Education
J.D., Harvard Law School, 2005
M.P.P, Kennedy School of Government, 2005
M.B.A., The Wharton School, 2000
B.S. in Economics, The Wharton School, 1999
B.A. in Philosophy, The University of Pennsylvania and Pembroke College, Oxford, 1999
Robert Jackson is not teaching any Law courses in Spring 2024.