Faculty and Research

JOSEPH HINSEY IV is the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, Emeritus, at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. He is a graduate of Cornell University, Cornell Law School and the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the HBS senior faculty in 1987, he was for more than twenty years a Partner in the New York law firm of White & Case, where he specialized in corporate and securities law with a particular emphasis on corporate governance.

His professional offices in the American Bar Association over the years include service as Chairman of the Business Law Section, Chairman of its Committee on Corporate Laws and Editor of The Business Lawyer. He served as Reporter for the ABA Business Law Section's Legal Opinion Project, completed in 1991, which involved the development of a standard frame of reference for third-party legal opinions that can be used by corporate lawyers throughout the country. He is an elected member of the American Law Insitute and served for many years as Consultant to its Corporate Governance Project,a fifteen-year undertaking that culminated in the 1993 publication of a two-volume work titled Principles of Corporate Governance. In addition, he was a founding member of the Legal Advisory Committee to the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange.

He has written and frequently spoken in professional seminars on corporate governance matters. Recently, he contributed a chapter on the corporate indemnification of directors and officers, covering the statutory provisions and related case law, which appears in the three-volume treatise titled Transactional Lawyer's Deskbook: Advising Business Entities, published in 2001. He also recently spearheaded, under the auspices of the ABA Committee on Corporate Laws, a major revision of the director provisions of the Model Business Corporation Act, a statutory format that provides guidance to approximately thirty-five states.