Associate Professor Anne Tucker received the 2016 Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship.
Associate Professor Anne Tucker received the 2016 Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship. The award annually recognizes up to two faculty members who, within the previous two calendar years, have compiled a substantial and continuing record of outstanding research and scholarly activity, as well as faculty who have during this period published particularly outstanding pieces of scholarship.
“A dedicated corporate law scholar, Professor Tucker is a most worthy recipient of this year’s Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship,” said Steven J. Kaminshine, dean and professor of law. “Her nationally recognized work on the citizen shareholder and the individual investor has helped shape the national conversation about the appropriate role and responsibilities of today’s private corporations in society’s public domains.”
Tucker wrote five articles in 2014-15, in addition to authoring a new Business Organizations casebook, which is used at several law schools. In 2015 her work appeared in the Harvard Business Law Journal and the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her 2014 article, “The Outside Investor,” was selected in a blind peer review to participate in the George Washington University C-LEAF junior faculty scholarship forum in corporate law and economics. Tucker’s other writing includes a co-authored amicus brief field with the U.S. Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, op-eds, and weekly contributions to Business Law Professor Blog.
During that same year, her scholarship was cited more than 80 times and she presented her work 16 times at academic conferences, symposiums and bar-focused events.
“The productivity and quality of our faculty’s scholarship is at such a high level that I am honored to even be considered for the award,” Tucker said. “I appreciate that Steve recognized scholarship in the business area, which is a field that can seem technical and less assessable for general audiences. It makes me feel like my contributions to our academic and intellectual culture, even if not the most glitzy, are valued.”
Tucker’s research primarily focuses on investors and capital markets, and corporate constitutional rights.
“Everyone is affected by the economy and the laws that regulate it, but many don’t understand its impact, whether that is on the housing market, our retirement accounts, the stock market as a whole, and more. My scholarship examines small pieces of our economic puzzle and asks how do the existing laws help, hurt or influence those participating in the economy,” she said.
Business law touches so many aspects of everyday life for everyone, yet “it is a relatively opaque process for most people,” she said. Her work helps to educate and protect those people.
She researches issues that affect private individuals by looking at retirement investors, as well as some the economy’s largest and most sophisticated investors like mutual funds and other institutional investors. Her work also includes joint projects with economists and finance scholars.
“One upcoming project focuses on impact investments where investors seek to earn a financial gain alongside measurable social and/or environmental gains. It is a fascinating and important market development,” she said.
Another project examines whether investors are increasingly becoming “short-term,” thus making decisions not compatible with long-term growth and sustainable development.
The Morgan award consists of a summer research grant in the amount of $12,500, as well as a course release.