Catching up with Christopher Nicholls, W. Geoff Beattie Chair in Corporate Law
October 27, 2025
Since joining Western Law in 2006, professor and W. Geoff Beattie Chair in Corporate Law, Christopher Nicholls has steered the Western Business Law Program to national prominence while expanding its impact around the world. As a prolific scholar of corporate law, corporate finance, securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, and the regulation of the financial industry, his own work has international reach.
Throughout his career, Nicholls has built an extensive global network serving as a visiting professor or visiting scholar at leading law faculties around the world including at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, Melbourne and the University of Tokyo. This fall, while on sabbatical leave, he has returned to the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law as a visiting scholar where he is exploring recent initiatives in open banking and finance in the United Kingdom.
“The UK is really a global leader in open banking,” said Nicholls. “I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and the potential problems posed by open banking that might prove helpful and illuminating as Canada begins the process of implementing its own open banking framework in the coming months.”
Having advised private law firms and government and regulatory agencies, Nicholls’ research examines current issues in corporate and securities law with the interests of both scholars and practitioners in mind.
“My most recent book on corporate law, to be published by Oxford University Press, considers the current interest of scholars and practitioners in ‘corporate purpose’ as well as environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors,” Nicholls explained.
“I am particularly interested in exploring these issues in the context of the historical development of the concept of corporate profit and shareholder wealth maximization, drawing not only on legal sources but also on the insights of scholars in other disciplines such as economics and sociology.”
Of equal importance to Nicholls is the impact of his research on his students and how they will approach legal and policy issues throughout their careers. His imperative to view corporate law from an international and interdisciplinary perspective is reflected in the pedagogy of the business law program.
“The Western Business Law Program is characterized by a commitment to international and interdisciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches. At some law schools in Canada, though business law courses are regarded as a necessary, vocational part of the law school’s mission, they are not necessarily viewed as central to the more theoretical, academic goals of the law school,” said Nicholls.
“At Western, we recognize the importance of integrating the theoretical and practical aspects of business law, and we encourage students to consider business law from a functional and academic perspective. We want our JD graduates to appreciate that the study of the law of business can be greatly enhanced by the insights of many cognate academic disciplines including economics, history, sociology and even psychology.”
On the benefits of blending theory and practice, Nicholls adds that enabling students to explore the theoretical foundations of business law fosters an ability to challenge stubborn myths and develop innovative solutions to emerging issues.
“I recall one of our distinguished academic visitors, a Nobel laureate, explaining how important it was for people to train themselves to ‘think conceptually’. Practitioners, he said, are very good at chopping down trees. But they don’t always know which trees they should be chopping down,” reflected Nicholls.
“Studying the law of business in a variety of contexts - in subjects such as corporate law, securities regulation, corporate tax and corporate finance - helps students develop a rigorous way of thinking about business problems and a thoughtful, analytical and creative approach to problem solving.”
Nicholls’ time at Cambridge has also provided occasion for reflection on the growth of the Western Business Law Program and ideation for future opportunities.
“We have created one of the strongest visiting business and law speakers programs at any law school in the world and created and grown Western University’s interdisciplinary Master of Financial Economics (MFE) program. We have also enhanced the Business Law Area of Concentration and pioneered the ‘corporate first’ initiative, in which Western became the first, and only, law school in Canada to give students interested in business law the chance to take corporate law in their first year,” said Nicholls.
“In the future, I hope to develop a new corporate and securities law specialization to build on our existing Business Law Area of Concentration. We will also continue to expand our curriculum to include courses that will help students deal thoughtfully and constructively with the newest advancements in the theory and practice of business law, including AI literacy and digital tools.”
While Nicholls acknowledges the potential impacts of emerging technologies such as AI on the future of corporate law services and legal education, he remains optimistic about the importance of legal education and the future of the legal profession.
“AI will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on the practice and teaching of law,” Nicholls says. “The prospect of unprecedented change makes many people understandably nervous. But how new technology will actually interact with human ingenuity is just too difficult to predict. I continue to be bullish about the transformative power of human creativity, and so I look forward to a bright and exciting future for law, for lawyers and for law schools as well.”
