Cynthia A. Williams

Cynthia A. Williams holds the Osler Chair in Business Law at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in Toronto, Canada.

Professor Williams's scholarship focuses on securities law and corporate law, with a particular emphasis on the corporate social relationship.

Professor Williams has been a Visiting Professor at Fordham University School of Law and a Visiting Associate Professor and Research Fellow at the Georgetown-Sloan Project on Business Institutions at Georgetown University Law Center. At the University of Illinois, Williams was a Fellow in the interdisciplinary Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics. Professor Williams is involved in several public service organizations developing federal guidelines for expanded social and environmental disclosure.

Professor Williams served as associate director of the Human SERVE Fund, a program devoted to voter registration reform, and has published in that area. Williams clerked for Judge Milton L. Schwartz, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. She then joined the New York office of Cravath, Swaine & Moore as a litigation associate, where she primarily handled cases involving securities and antitrust issues, and a number of civil rights and constitutional law cases for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, including litigation in the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Williams's Harvard Law Review article, "The Securities and Exchange Commission and Corporate Social Transparency," was the lead article reprinted in the Securities Law Review 2000, and was recognized by Corporate Practice Commentator as one of the 10 best corporate or securities articles published in 1999. She has recently published a series of articles on the corporate social relationship, including Corporate Social Responsibility in an Era of Economic Globalization, (35 University of California at Davis Law Review 705, 2002); "Civil Society Initiatives and 'Soft Law' in the Oil and Gas Industry," 36 N.Y.U. J Int'l L & Pol. 457 (2004); and An Emerging Third Way?: The Erosion of the Anglo-American Value Construct, 38 Cornell Int'l L.J. (forthcoming 2005) (with John Conley). In addition Professor Williams recently published a casebook with Gordon Smith entitled Business Organizations: Cases, Problems, and Case Studies (Aspen Press 2004).

Professor Williams graduated cum laude from New York University School of Law where she was an articles editor of the New York University Law Review, a Root-Tilden Public Interest Scholar, and a member of Order of the Coif. While at NYU, she also earned several American Jurisprudence Awards. From January 1982 to June 1983, she worked as a research technician at the Rockefeller University in New York, where she performed experiments, biochemical assays, purifications in developmental neurobiology. She assisted in experimental design and interpretation; edited papers and grant applications, and co-authored a paper published in the Journal of Developmental Brain Research.

Cynthia Williams
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Toronto, ON 
1.416.736.5545
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