Poonam Puri (Fall)

Senior Global Research Fellow
Canada
pp3138@nyu.edu

Poonam Puri is the Tier I York Research Chair in Corporate Governance and a Full Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is also Head of the Capital Markets Initiative at the David and Sharon Johnston Centre for Corporate Governance Innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. A recipient of the Mundell Medal for excellence in legal writing, the Law Society of Ontario Medal for outstanding contributions to the legal profession, and the Royal Society of Canada’s Allaire Medal for exemplary research contributions in governance, Professor Puri is also a former Commissioner of the Ontario Securities Commission and former President of the Canadian Law and Economics Association Professor Puri is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (LLB, 1995, Silver Medalist) and Harvard Law School (LLM, 1997).

Professor Puri’s scholarly work is in several fields: corporate law and governance, securities regulation and investor protection, and regulatory and private enforcement. Her methodologies include comparative empirical analysis as well as law and economics.  

Her book Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset Backed Commercial Paper Crisis (UofT, 2016) critically analyzes what went wrong during the financial crisis of 2007-09, and how financial regulators, banks, institutional investors and rating agencies could have stepped up their governance practices to avoid or mitigate the effects of the crisis. She compares the extent of the crisis and responses in Canada with the US and UK. She is also co-author of the leading Canadian corporate law casebook.

Professor Puri is currently working on research projects on shareholder proposals and stakeholder activism, ESG and its backlash, relations between corporations and Indigenous peoples, and the governance and regulation of private and central bank digital currencies, among others.

During her stay at NYU, Professor Puri plans to conduct research on corporate governance and financial markets in an era of unprecedented digital disruption and change, given the rise in the use of artificial intelligence by corporations in their engagement with key stakeholders.  Her research will advance the scholarly debate and help guide governments, regulators, corporations and other market actors as they respond in real-time to transformational shifts in the economy and society. 

Center Affiliation: Pollack Center for Law & Business
Research Project: The Future of Corporate Governance and Financial Markets in an Era of Digital Disruption