Professor William W. Bratton, a world-renowned authority in business and corporate law, continues to shape the academic landscape with two significant releases in 2025: the milestone tenth edition of his definitive casebook and a new theoretical study in the Journal of Corporation Law.
Holding the de la Cruz/Mentschikoff Chair in Law and Economics at the School of Law, Bratton’s “Corporate Finance: Cases and Materials” (10th ed. 2025) remains the "gold standard" for legal education, now updated to reflect the volatile complexities of the modern market. This landmark edition moves beyond traditional theory to tackle contemporary "hardball" debt tactics and the rise of "creditor-on-creditor violence" in distressed restructurings. It also provides a vital roadmap for the tech sector by overhauling venture capital materials and introducing a dedicated chapter on multiple-class common capital structures, alongside critical updates on SPACs and judicial shifts in appraisal cases.
Complementing this casebook is his latest theoretical work, "Substance and Process in Corporate Law: Theory and History," published in the Journal of Corporation Law (50 J. Corp. L. 893). Co-authored with Simone M. Sepe, the article explores why Delaware courts have moved away from reviewing the economic merits of deals in favor of analyzing the fairness of the procedures. The authors argue that this shift is a structural necessity; because courts lack a definitive theory of economic value, they gravitate toward process review—an area where lawyers and judges possess "epistemic familiarity."
Prior to joining Miami Law in 2020, Bratton was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School where he was co-director of the Institute for Law & Economics.
