Overview
Elisabeth de Fontenay's primary research interests are in the fields of corporate law, corporate finance, and financial institutions. She joined the Duke Law faculty in 2013 after serving as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. At Duke Law, she teaches Business Associations, Corporate Finance, and Private Equity & Hedge Funds, and received the law school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014.
Her broad research agenda focuses on how market actors behave in the less-regulated spaces of the financial markets. In “Private Equity Firms as Gatekeepers”, de Fontenay contends that private equity firms create value not just through better corporate governance, but also by acting as gatekeepers in the debt markets. In another recent article, “Do the Securities Laws Matter? The Rise of the Leveraged Loan Market”, she argues that the dramatic convergence of regulated and unregulated products in the corporate debt markets suggests that the securities laws are having little effect in that space.
De Fontenay received her B.A., summa cum laude, in economics from Princeton University, where she was a two-time All-American rugby player. She received her J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, de Fontenay practiced as a corporate associate at Ropes & Gray in Boston, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions, debt financing, and private investment funds. Her scholarly articles are available for download here.