Victor Brudney

Victor Brudney was a corporate law major figure at the Harvard Law School. Brudney joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1970 as a visiting professor. He served as a professor of law from 1971 to 1988, and later as the Robert B. and Candice J. Haas Professor in Corporate Finance Law, Emeritus. Early in his career he taught at Rutgers Law, and later he was an emeritus law professor at Boston College (1994 to 2007). He was also a visiting law professor at Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Fordham. Brudney was a corporate law pioneer who foresaw problems and highlighted issues that occupy the field to this date. Three decades before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, Brudney anticipated the significance of corporate law rules for regulating corporate speech. In a 1981 Yale Law Review article, “Business Corporations and Stockholders’ Rights Under the First Amendment,” Brudney wrote, “law is needed―to allocate the corporation‘s capacity to become a speaker.”