Henry B. Hansmann, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law, 1983-2019, and Professorial Lecturer in Law, 2019-
Henry B. Hansmann
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Henry B. Hansmann (1945-) graduated from the Law School in 1974 and earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1978. He joined the Law School faculty in 1983 and was the first joint J.D.-Ph.D. in Economics on the faculty.
Hansmann’s scholarship focuses on the law and economics of organizational ownership and design. Through this analytical lens, he has examined legal entities of every kind, from proprietary to nonprofit, private to public, domestic to foreign, and ancient to modern. His article, “The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise,” 89 Yale L.J. 835 (1980), was the first to characterize non-profit organizations as rational economic responses to specific market contexts, mitigating information asymmetries between donors and those they seek to benefit, rather than creatures of history or embodiments of ethical consideration. In addition to his seminal work on non-profits, his magisterial book, The Ownership of Enterprise, continues to provide powerful insight, as evidenced by a conference at Columbia Law School honoring Hansmann and the book’s 25th anniversary in 2021.
In presenting the Corporate Law Center’s Simeon E. Baldwin Award to Hansmann in 2018, YLS Sterling Professor and Center Director Roberta Romano stated that: “Henry is unusual among legal scholars: few academics are fortunate enough to stand for one proposition or are associated with one good idea; but Henry is associated with at least three such contributions” – namely, (i) the theory of non-profits; (ii) the theory of the structure or ownership of enterprises in general; and (iii) the asset partitioning theory of corporate organization. Moreover, as Romano noted, “Henry has not only made well-cited normative contributions, but also is equally, if not better known for his research on the foundational question of why organizations are structured as they are, rather than writing on how organizations should be organized.” In addition to receiving the Simeon E. Baldwin Award, Hansmann is a past president of the American Law and Economics Organization and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Corporate Governance Institute.