Bernard S. Black
Nicholas J. Chabraja Professor
Northwestern University
Bernard S. Black is the Nicholas D. Chabraja Professor at Northwestern University and an academic affiliate of the International Center for Law & Economics. At Northwestern, he holds appointments in the Pritzker School of Law, the Kellogg School of Management’s finance department, and the Institute for Policy Research.
His research focuses on health policy and medical malpractice, empirical methods for causal inference, law & economics, law and finance, and international corporate governance.
Black previously held the Hayden W. Head Regents Chair for Faculty Excellence at the University of Texas School of Law and served as professor of finance in the McCombs School of Business and director of the Center for Law, Business, and Economics. Before that, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and earlier a professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Earlier in his career, he served as senior policy adviser to the Harvard Institute for International Development’s Russia Legal Reform Project, counsel to a commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, practiced corporate and securities law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
He is co-author of “Medical Malpractice Litigation: How It Works; Why Tort Reform Hasn’t Helped,” and co-author of “The Law and Finance of Corporate Acquisitions.” He also co-authored “A Guide to the Russian Law on Joint Stock Companies,” “Negotiating and Drafting the Acquisition Agreement,” and “(Some of) the Essentials of Finance and Investment.”
Black founded the annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies and is a founding editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting.
He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a master’s in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s, magna cum laude, from Princeton University.
