George S. Georgiev

Areas of Expertise

Business Law, Corporate Governance, Securities Regulation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Finance, Executive Compensation

Courses

Business Associations, Advanced Corporate Law, Contracts, Corporate Governance, Securities Regulation

Biography

George S. Georgiev is a scholar of business law. His research examines topics at the intersection of corporate governance and securities law, including questions about the design, performance, and evolution of the SEC regulatory regime for public companies. He teaches Business Associations, Contracts, and upper-level business law courses as part of Emory’s marquee program in Corporate and Transactional Law. Both his teaching and his research are informed by his graduate training in economics and his extensive practice experience. In April 2024, Emory awarded him the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education, which recognizes “outstanding scholars who excel as teachers.”

Professor Georgiev’s scholarship appears in peer-edited volumes and in journals such as the UCLA Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, and the premier business law journals published by Harvard, Yale, and NYU. Several of his articles have been selected by senior scholars for republication in anthologies of leading law review articles, including the Securities Law Review and the Corporate Practice Commentator. In 2023, he was awarded a research grant by the Ford Foundation. He is a frequent speaker at academic conferences and serves on the executive committees of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Business Associations and the Section on Securities Regulation.

One strand in Professor Georgiev’s research has focused on the sustainability movement in corporate law and seeks to illuminate emerging developments by blending theoretical, historical, and comparative perspectives. He has written about both of the movement’s core components: environmental matters and workforce-related matters. His 2021 article on the rise of human capital management in corporate law has garnered extensive attention from academics and policymakers for its original and comprehensive treatment of this novel phenomenon. Drawing on his prior work and new research, in 2022 he co-authored an analysis affirming the SEC’s authority to adopt climate-related disclosure rules, which was joined by many of the country’s leading scholars of corporate and securities law and submitted as a comment letter to the SEC.

Professor Georgiev’s scholarship also contributes to policy debates and public discourse. He has testified before Congress, and his work has been cited by the Delaware Court of Chancery, in Congressional testimony, in SEC rulemaking releases, by the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, by SEC Commissioners of both political parties, and in numerous submissions to the SEC from academics, corporate governance experts, investors, NGOs, and other stakeholders. He has also been quoted in various prominent media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, USA Today, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, Reuters, Vox, NPR, CNN, and the BBC.

Professor Georgiev received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School. He also holds an MA in economics from the University of Munich and a BA, summa cum laude, in economics and international relations from Colgate University. He joined the Emory faculty in 2016 after serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Lowell Milken Business Law Institute Teaching Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Before entering academia, he worked for close to six years as a corporate lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Clifford Chance LLP. While in practice, he advised on complex cross-border M&A deals and on a wide variety of debt and equity financing transactions, including landmark transactions such as the recapitalizations of several large banks during and after the 2008 global financial crisis.

Professor Georgiev’s scholarship is available for download via SSRN and Google Scholar. Shorter works aimed at broader audiences have appeared in the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, the Oxford Business Law Blog, and the Harvard Forum on Corporate Governance; opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Hill, and elsewhere; podcast interviews have appeared on the Voices of Corporate Governance Podcast and the Business Scholarship Podcast. You can follow Professor Georgiev’s professional activities on Twitter @GeorgievLaw.