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 various upper-level business law courses. Both his teaching and his research are informed by his graduate training in economics and his extensive practice experience. In April 2024, Emory recognized him with the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education, which honors “outstanding scholars who excel as teachers and mentors.”

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 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 Ford Foundation research grant. He is a frequent speaker at academic conferences and serves on the executive committees of the AALS Section on Business Associations and the AALS Section on Securities Regulation. In September 2024, the SEC appointed him to a four-year term as a member of its Investor Advisory Committee, which advises the agency on regulatory priorities and investor protection and securities market integrity initiatives.

One strand in Professor Georgiev’s research has focused on the sustainability movement in corporate law and has sought 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 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 of 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. A major new project focuses on the global drive for sustainability accounting and its implications for the future of corporate law.

Professor Georgiev’s scholarship also contributes to policy debates and public discourse. He has testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Climate Change Taskforce. His work has been cited by the Delaware Court of Chancery, in Congressional testimony, in SEC rulemaking releases, by SEC Commissioners of both political parties, and in numerous submissions to the SEC from academics, corporate governance experts, investors, and others. He is often asked to provide legal commentary for 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 at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Before entering academia, he was a corporate lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Clifford Chance LLP for close to six years. 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.