Upcoming Events
Business Law: Substance and Practice
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1001 | Streaming Link
Professor Patel will give King Hall students an overview of major business law practice areas, including M&A, securities litigation, capital markets, emerging companies/venture capital, tax, and antitrust. He will cover the kinds of cases and transactions attorneys in each area handle, what their day-to-day work generally looks like, and which classes offered at King Hall would be valuable for students interested in a particular practice area. He will also offer advice on interviewing and career planning.
Lunch provided.
Big Law Recruiter Panel
Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 2303 | Register Here
The Business Law Society is proud to host a panel with recruiters from big law firms such as Cooley; Pillsbury, Ropes & Gray; Lowenstein Sandler, and more. Meet the firms you're interested in before you apply.
Sponsored by the Business Law Society and CBLS. Lunch provided.
AI and the Evolution of the BigLaw Associate
Monday, Oct. 19, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall | MCLE Credits Available | No Registration Fee | Livestreamed
Evelynn Chun '22 will speak from her experience as an associate in Goodwin’s Business Law department and a member of its Technology & Life Sciences group. She joined Goodwin in 2022 and serves as a member of the hiring committee for Goodwin’s Silicon Valley office.
Lunch provided.
Transactional Practice Outside of BigLaw
Monday, Nov. 9, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall | Livestreamed
This discussion will examine the range of transactional careers available outside of BigLaw, drawing on a career path that began in litigation before transitioning to corporate transactions, M&A, and healthcare law. Anders L. Bostrom ’20 will discuss the practical work transactional lawyers perform for businesses, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations, from mergers and acquisitions to governance and outside general counsel matters. He will describe life at a mid-sized firm and a specialized healthcare firm, and explore how lawyers develop niche expertise, build client relationships, and leverage emerging technologies, including AI, to deliver legal services more effectively. This session will provide students with a practical perspective on the opportunities available in modern transactional practice.
Anders is a Senior Associate in Feldesman LLP’s Health Care practice. He advises healthcare providers, physician groups, management services organizations (MSOs), health systems, healthcare technology companies, private equity sponsors, and investors on healthcare transactions and regulatory compliance. His practice focuses on healthcare mergers and acquisitions, physician practice acquisitions, MSO transactions, ambulatory surgery center transactions, and provider affiliations. He has represented physician practices, health systems, and investors in transactions throughout California and nationally.
Lunch provided.
Past Events
- Experts in Business Law Lunch Speaker Series
Corporate Metamorphosis: How Shifting Ownership from Investors to Customers Will Change the World
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | Streaming Link
Since its inception 400 years ago, the corporation has become the world’s most powerful engine for seeding and scaling new businesses. But corporations have a dark side: The fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value can lead corporations to bend rules that protect customers and employees. To solve this problem, James Wigginton and a group of leaders called the Blockchain Cooperative Coalition are advancing legislation called Regulation Membership, which would make it easy for customers to become co-owners of the businesses they use every day. Using Regulation Membership, investor-owned businesses can transform into customer-owned businesses — the same way caterpillars transform into butterflies — allowing businesses to harness both the growth potential of corporations and the customer welfare benefits of cooperatives over the course of the business lifecycle.
James Wigginton is a venture capital and technology attorney at Orrick. He focuses on developing legal structures that can be used to facilitate customer ownership of sports teams, social networks, commerce platforms, and more. James is a graduate of BYU, the University of Cambridge, and Stanford Law School. He began his legal career as a clerk for Judge Richard W. Goldberg of the US Court for International Trade, and he worked as a transactional attorney doing public securities offerings and M&A at Sullivan & Cromwell before returning to his native Sacramento.
Lunch provided.Comparative Directors’ Sustainability Accountability in Taiwan’s Semiconductor Sector
Thursday, April 9, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 2306 | Streaming Link
Since the semiconductor industry became the engine of global innovation and resilience, director accountability for sustainability has gained international prominence. This session examines the establishment of ESG committees in Taiwan’s semiconductor firms and compares them with the latest landmark cases in the U.S. and Australia. By synthesizing empirical evidence with judicial developments, we analyze how boards navigate implementation challenges across these three jurisdictions. The discussion reveals the strategic transition from short-term profit guardians to accountable sustainability stewards in a complex regulatory landscape.
Edith I-Tzu Su is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Law, National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) in Taiwan, currently serving as the Director of the Academic Exchange Division at the Office of International Affairs. Dr. Su holds a J.S.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and has been a visiting scholar at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Sydney, with research focusing on comparative director's duties. As a recognized authority in corporate law, she served on the drafting committee for Taiwan’s Company Act amendments, and her scholarly theories and arguments have been frequently adopted by regulatory authorities and codified into law. Her expertise spans comparative corporate governance and ESG frameworks across Taiwan, the U.S., and Australia.
Lunch provided.Perspectives from the General Counsel of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System
Wednesday, April 1, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | Streaming LinkUC Davis School of Law Professors Amelia Miazad and Menesh Patel will facilitate a discussion with Brian J. Bartow ’89 on his role as the general counsel of California State Teachers’ Retirement Fund, CalSTRS, the largest educator-only pension fund in the world. As an established leader in the investment fund community, CalSTRS is widely recognized for its shareholder engagement, corporate governance efforts, and sustainability and ESG investing policies. The conversation will explore how the pension fund strategically leverages these efforts to improve corporate performance and enhance financial outcomes for its nearly one million beneficiaries.
Bartow has been with CalSTRS since 2008, first as assistant general counsel and then as acting general counsel before being appointed general counsel in 2010. Before coming to CalSTRS, he was assistant chief counsel for the Department of Social Services. He has also held high-level legal positions at the California Department of Managed Health Care and the California Department of Corporations.
After graduating from King Hall, Bartow began his legal career in private practice representing hospital systems, hospitals, and health care providers in complex transactions and litigation. He also represented major corporate clients and gained substantial experience in corporate, partnership, and business law, and business litigation.
Lunch provided.Gender Disparities in Corporate Law and Governance
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1303 | Streaming Link
John D. Ayer Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law and Society Afra Afsharipour served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2018 to 2024. She researches in the areas of comparative corporate law, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, and transactional law. She has taught courses in business associations, mergers and acquisitions, startups and venture capital, and antitrust. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in several books and law reviews, including Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Georgia Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, National Law School of India Review, and other leading journals. She is co-editor of Comparative Corporate Governance (eds. Afra Afsharipour & Martin Gelter, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2021). She authored the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India: Legal Standards and Board Practices (The Conference Board 2016) and co-authored the 2021 edition of the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India: Legal Standards and Board Practices (The Conference Board 2021).
Professor Afsharipour has delivered numerous talks, nationally and internationally, and has been a visiting scholar in India, China and Taiwan. She is quoted regularly by leading national and international news outlets, and her research has been featured in the New York Times and the American Lawyer, as well as other national news outlets.
Co-sponsored with the Business Law Journal. Lunch provided.From Entity to Enterprise: Improving the Accountability of Multinational Corporate Groups
Monday, March 9, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | Streaming Link
Under the “entity theory” of corporate law, which treats each individual corporation as a distinct legal entity, owners of a corporation cannot be held responsible for its debts and obligations. Likewise, a non-resident parent corporation is not subject to jurisdiction in a particular forum just because one of its subsidiaries does business there. These principles sometimes frustrate efforts of litigants in U.S. courts to hold multinational enterprises fully accountable for the impacts of their operations. There are of course some limits to corporate independence, in the form of “alter ego” and other veil-piercing strategies, but those doctrines are very difficult to invoke. In view of the ever-expanding size and scale of enterprise groups, some scholars have advocated for a more radical shift to an “enterprise” theory of corporate law that would reject the legal formalism of corporate personality where groups of corporations act as a unitary economic enterprise. Professor Hannah Buxbaum's talk will address the possibility of using enterprise theory to advance corporate accountability.
Co-sponsored with the Business Law Journal. Lunch provided.Approaches to Investor Protection in the Green Bond Market
Wednesday, March 4, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | Streaming Link
Martin Luther King Jr. Professor John Patrick Hunt’s area of scholarly interest is law and finance. His recent work focuses on student-loan bankruptcy; previously, his scholarship has addressed municipal bankruptcy, credit rating agencies, and mortgage securitization, transfer, and modification. Before joining the UC Davis faculty in 2009, John was Research Director of the Law and Finance Program at the Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy. He has also worked as a regulatory lawyer and litigator at two major law firms and as a credit derivatives research analyst. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Master’s in Financial Engineering from the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Hunt is a member of the American Law Institute.
Co-sponsored with the Business Law Journal. Lunch provided.Corporate Climate Governance
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1002 | Streaming LinkClimate risk disclosure mandates have already been widely adopted internationally and in the United States, despite implementation challenges. All of them aim to standardize how information on climate-related financial risk reaches the capital markets, with international standards extending to material sustainability risks as well. All of them also ask companies to prioritize these stakeholder-linked considerations and to embed them into corporate governance mechanisms in some form.
City University of Hong Kong School of Law Professor Virginia Harper Ho will discuss how mandatory climate disclosure is already shifting corporate governance norms and standards toward stakeholder integration, along with the implications of this shift for corporate governance doctrine and practice. Professor Harper Ho has contributed to ESG reform initiatives of the Singapore Exchange (SGX), the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários), and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Before entering academia, she practiced corporate and securities law and advised U.S. and foreign multinationals on cross-border transactions with a focus on Asia. Her article “Corporate Climate Governance” is forthcoming in the Journal of Corporation Law.
Co-sponsored with the Center for International Law and Policy. Lunch provided.
- Inaugural Symposium: California and the Future of Business Law
- Thursday, January 29, 2026 | King Hall
Practitioners, policy makers, and faculty launched the new Center for Business Law and Society. Panels explored the nexus between business law and pressing social issues, from AI to climate risk. Details and recordings here. - 2024 National Business Law Scholars Conference
- Monday, June 24 - Tuesday, June 25, 2024 | King Hall
UC Davis School of Law hosted the fifteenth annual National Business Law Scholars Conference. During the two-day event, legal scholars from across the United States and around the world gathered to discuss current research. The event featured opening remarks from Dean Kevin R. Johnson, a plenary discussion, concurrent panels, and a reception at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.