Nobel Prize winner takes part in fireside chat at Western Law
February 20, 2025
Professor Bengt Holmström, the co-recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics, visited Western Law on February 11 as Western Law’s 2025 Annual Business and Law Speaker, an event co-sponsored by the Torys LLP Corporate and Securities Law Forum and Western Law School’s Law and Economics Research Group. Professor Holmström participated in a fireside chat with Professor Christopher Nicholls, the W Geoff Beattie Chair in Corporate Law, before a large audience of including students, faculty, and other interested members of the law school, university, and wider community.
In his conversation with Professor Nicholls, Professor Holmström canvassed a number of important issues relating to corporate governance, contract theory, and theories of the firm, drawing not only on his globally influential theoretical scholarship but also on his many years of first-hand experience as a board member with large corporations, including Nokia.
He offered insights on the evolution of corporate governance and incentive structures, the wisdom of the late Clay Christensen’s notion of the “Innovator’s dilemma,” how the American corporate governance experience could offer important lessons for the corporate sector in Europe, and changing views of the business corporation’s purpose from traditional theories of the firm associated with economists Ronald Coase and Milton Friedman to the rise of, and recent challenges to, ESG.
Acting Dean Andrew Botterell, who introduced the fireside chat, noted that the Annual Business and Law lecture has become a signature event at Western University, and thanked the donors that make such events possible.
Professor Nicholls reiterated Dean Botterell’s thanks. “We are especially grateful to Torys LLP and to Geoff Beattie for their generous and continuing support of the law school and particularly of this illustrious business and law speakers series,” Nicholls says. “Western Law’s Annual Business and Law lecture is not only a major event at the law school, it has also attracted national and international attention.”
The Torys LLP Corporate and Securities Law Forum was established in 2015 together with the creation of the W. Geoff Beattie Chair in Corporate Law, thanks to generous donations by the Torys LLP firm, Western Law alumni at the firm, and Geoff Beattie, LLB '84, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Generation Capital.
The Annual Business and Law lecture continues a series originally launched in 2008 as the Beattie Family Business and Law Lecture. Past speakers in the series include five Nobel- Prize-winning economists (Robert Shiller, George Akerlof, Sir Oliver Hart, Jean Tirole, and Myron Scholes), former Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo E. Strine Jr., Yale economist Gary Gorton, and Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and President Emeritus of Harvard University.
