Professor George Geis’ Scholarship Among Best Corporate Law Articles of the Year

University of Virginia School of Law professor George Geis’ paper examining how blockchain technology could revolutionize financial markets and business law has been named one of the top 10 corporate and securities articles of 2018.

A poll of academics conducted for Corporate Practice Commentator selected Geis’ paper, “Traceable Shares and Corporate Law,” forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review, out of nearly 400 candidates.

During a talk at the Law School in 2018, he said the technology best known for cryptocurrency, if applied to traditional stock markets, could transform trading by providing investors with detailed information regarding a share’s past owners.

Geis’ research was the focus of an episode of “Common Law,” a Law School-sponsored podcast. Geis and Mayme Donohue, an attorney with Hunton Andrews Kurth, discussed how blockchain has implications for tracking stocks, payment systems, and supply chains such as grocery produce and more.

“If the technology plays out the way a lot of people think it might play it out, it actually could have pretty big implications on corporate law, because I think it could change the way we track ownership histories of stock,” Geis said.

Corporate Practice Commentator is a 30-plus-volume set of journals featuring articles written on all aspects of corporate law. The articles poll began in 1994.

Geis is the William S. Potter Professor of Law and Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law. His research focuses on problems related to contract theory, business alliances, shareholder litigation, and other issues involving the intersection of law and business. Geis also is faculty adviser for the Law School’s J.D.-MBA dual-degree program. This year, he was named a recipient of UVA’s All-University Teaching Award.

In the past, the poll has recognized professors Michal Barzuza, Albert Choi, Edmund Kitch and Paul Mahoney.