Corporate &
Finance Law

Corporate & Finance Law at Fordham Law

At Fordham, learning about corporate law is not limited to casebooks; students dive into live cases and controversies. “Some come to the basic Corporations class scared or thinking they are going to hate it because business is boring or evil,” says Professor Sean Griffith. “But then they open their eyes to how fun and intellectually stimulating the cases are, and learn something they had been resisting their whole lives. It’s great being a part of that process.”

One reason Fordham Law’s students get so inspired is because they, too, are part of the process—doing research for real corporate law cases. Those in Professor Griffith’s Mergers and Acquisitions seminar, for instance, monitor his portfolio of acquired companies, pull the companies’ supplemental disclosures from EDGAR (the SEC’s electronic data system), and analyze them. This work finds its way into cases Griffith argues in court. “We follow the litigation from the complaints through to settlement, looking at both sides of the case,” he says. “Students love this connection between the classroom and the courtroom.”

After taking the Mergers and Acquisitions seminar and other classes with Griffith, Marianna Wonder ’17 helped brief an objection to a settlement in New Jersey involving a company called Metalico. Working as a summer associate at a Wall Street law firm, Wonder sat in an office with her coworkers when Griffith sent her the news that the New Jersey judge had rejected the Metalico settlement based on their objection. “We won!” she recalls shouting to her office mates, who were impressed that she had “done something real,” especially since it was in their area of expertise. “When I started to work at the law firm, having something more substantial to talk about with the lawyers there put me a little closer to their level,” she says. “I have a master’s in business, and Professor Griffith’s classes helped get me interested in the legal side of corporations and M&A,” says Wonder, who is now an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton. “He’s easily one of the most influential professors I’ve had.”