Henry Hansmann appointed the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor

Henry B. Hansmann, the newly named Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law is a scholar of corporate law whose principal focus is on the law and economics of organizational ownership and design.

He has written extensively about non-profit organizations, the relationship between contract law and organizational law, the historical evolution of organizational forms and the structure of property rights. In addition to his many articles, he is the author of “The Ownership of Enterprise,” and, with others, “The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Functional and Comparative Analysis.”

A graduate of Brown University, Hansmann earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1974 and a Ph.D. in economics, also from Yale, in 1978. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Yale faculty in 1983. He was named the Sam Harris Professor of Law in 1988. He left Yale in 2003 to serve for a year as a professor at New York University School of Law. He returned to Yale in 2004 as the Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law. Hansmann has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

At Yale, Hansmann teaches courses on business organizations; contracts; law, economics and organization; and the legal and economic history of enterprise.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the law professor is a past recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is a past president of the American Law and Economics Association.