News & Events: Delaware Campus

School of Law marks 26th-annual Pileggi lecture with talk by California professor

Public Relations - Published: October 11, 2010

The law school and its student-run Delaware Journal of Corporate Law presented the 26th-annual Francis G. Pileggi Distinguished Lecture in Law recently when it welcomed Stanford Law Professor Joseph A. Grundfest to the First State for a breakfast talk about corporate disputes.

Grundfest, the William A. Franke Professor of Law at Stanford, spoke to members of the Delaware legal community about “Choice of Forum in Intracorporate Litigation,” on Friday, Oct. 8 in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington. He gave an encore version of the lecture later that morning to a Delaware campus classroom filled with law students.

Grundfest explored the use of forum selection clauses in corporate indemnification agreements that are struck with directors and senior officers. He called them an “innovation,” maintaining they are a mechanism for ensuring that lawsuits involving the internal affairs or governance of a corporation are litigated in the company’s state of incorporation – in most cases, Delaware.

“I don’t see how adoption of this winds up systematically hurting corporations,” he said. “I don’t see a downside to this innovation.”

Grundfest co-directs Stanford Law’s Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, which works to advance the practice and study of corporate governance. He has taught courses in securities regulation, corporate law and venture capital. He holds an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from Stanford. Before he joined the Stanford Law faculty, Grundfest was a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission and he served on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors as counsel and senior economist for legal and regulatory matters. He is chairman of the nominating committee of the NASDAQ stock market.

The annual Pileggi lecture has attracted many renowned speakers in the area of corporate law since the first event in 1986. It is made possible by the generosity of Francis G. Pileggi, a founding attorney of Pileggi & Pileggi and father of Widener Law alumnus Francis G.X. Pileggi, who conceived of the idea through a desire to create a corporate law forum for practitioners, judges and academics.

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