Pollman, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Pollman

Professor of Law
William M. Rains Senior Research Fellow

Elizabeth Pollman, Professor of Law, William M. Rains Senior Research Fellow

• Business Associations
• Corporations
• Contracts
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Innovation & Regulation

Links

• CV

Education

• AB, with distinction, Stanford University
• JD, with distinction, Stanford Law School, Order of the Coif

Background

Professor Pollman teaches business law courses and her research focuses on corporate governance, purpose, and personhood as well as on startups, entrepreneurship, and law and technology.

She was the 2014 recipient of the ESBA Excellence in Teaching Award at Loyola Law School and has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Sydney Law School, and UC Berkeley School of Law. She has served on the ABA Corporate Laws Committee, the Executive Committee of the AALS section on Business Associations, and the Organizing Committee for the National Business Law Scholars Conference. Her media appearances include NPR Morning Edition, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. 

Before joining the Loyola faculty, Pollman was a fellow at the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, and a lecturer and Thomas C. Grey fellow at Stanford Law School. She previously practiced as a transactional lawyer and business litigator at Latham & Watkins in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. She clerked for the Honorable Raymond C. Fisher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She earned both her B.A. and J.D., with distinction, from Stanford University. Before law school, she managed a business development team at a publishing startup that was acquired by one of the country’s largest newspaper publishers.

Selected Scholarship

Articles

• Startup Governance (forthcoming U. Pa. L. Rev. 2019)
• Corporate Disobedience, 68 Duke L.J. 709 (2019)
• Regulatory Entrepreneurship, 90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 383 (2017) (with Jordan M. Barry)
• Constitutionalizing Corporate Law, 69 Vand. L. Rev. 639 (2016)
• The Derivative Nature of Corporate Constitutional Rights, 56 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1673 (2015) (with Margaret M. Blair)
• A Corporate Right to Privacy, 99 Minn. L. Rev. 27 (2014)
• Information Issues on Wall Street 2.0, 161 U. Pa. L. Rev. 179 (2012)
• Reconceiving Corporate Personhood, 2011 Utah L. Rev. 1629 

Book Chapters

• Fiduciary Law and the Preservation of Trust in Business Relationships, in Fiduciaries and Trust: Ethics, Politics, Economics and Law (Paul B. Miller & Matthew Harding eds.) (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019-2020) (with Brian Broughman & D. Gordon Smith)
• The Rise of Regulatory Affairs in Innovative Startups, in The Handbook on Law and Entrepreneurship in the United States (D. Gordon Smith, Christine Hurt & Brian Broughman eds.) (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019)
• Corporate Governance Beyond Economics, in The Corporate Contract in Changing Times: Is the Law Keeping Up? (Steven Davidoff Solomon & Randall Thomas, eds.) (University of Chicago Press 2019)
• Social and Asocial Enterprise, in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law (Benjamin Means & Joseph W. Yockey, eds.) (Cambridge University Press 2018)
• The Supreme Court’s View of Corporate Rights: Two Centuries of Evolution and Controversy, in Corporations and American Democracy (with Margaret M. Blair) (Naomi R. Lamoreaux & William J. Novak, eds.) (Harvard University Press 2017)
• Corporate Law and Theory in Hobby Lobby, in The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (Micah Schwartzman, Chad Flanders & Zoë Robinson, eds.) (Oxford University Press 2016)

Essays & Shorter Works

• Tech, Regulatory Arbitrage, and Limits, Eur. Bus. Org. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2019-2020) (Oxford Business Law Symposium)
• Quasi Governments and Inchoate Laws: Berle's Vision of Limits on Corporate Power, 42 Seattle U. L. Rev. 617 (2019) (Berle Symposium)
• Line Drawing in Corporate Rights Determinations, 65 DePaul L. Rev. 597 (2016) (Clifford Symposium)
• Team Production Theory and Private Company Boards, 38 Seattle U. L. Rev. 619 (2015) (Berle Symposium)
• Citizens Not United: The Lack of Stockholder Voluntariness in Corporate Political Speech, 119 Yale L.J. Online 53 (2009)