Kenneth E. Scott

About

Kenneth E. Scott passed away on June 19, 2016.

Scott was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business Emeritus, Stanford University Law School. He taught public regulation of banking institutions, corporation law, securities law, and administrative law. His most recent research focused on legislative and policy developments related to the financial crisis, bank regulation, and deposit insurance. He also studied the application of new economic perspectives to securities regulation, corporate law, and comparative corporate governance issues.

Scott was the author of five books: Making Failure Feasible: How Bankruptcy Reform Can End Too Big To Fail (Hoover Institution Press, 2015), edited with John Taylor and Tom Jackson; Bankruptcy Not Bailout (Hoover Institution Press, 2012), edited with John Taylor; Ending Government Bailouts (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), edited with George Shultz and John Taylor; Economics of Corporation Law and Securities Regulation (1980), edited with Richard Posner; and Retail Banking in the Electronic Age: The Law and Economics of Electronic Funds Transfer (1977), with William Baxter and Paul Cootner.

Recent articles included “The Financial Crisis: Causes and Lessons,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 22 (2010): 22, and (with Theo. Baums) "Taking Shareholder Protection Seriously? Corporate Governance in the US and Germany," American Journal of Comparative Law 53 (2005): 31.

Scott was the chair and driving force behind the Resolution Project established at the Hoover Institution in the spring of 2009. Under Scott's leadership, this group developed the very influential Chapter 14 reform proposal, which is now part of legislation that has passed the House of Representatives.

He was also an active member of the Hoover Working Group on Economic Policy.

Scott joined the Stanford law faculty in 1968. From 1963 to 1968, he served as general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington, DC, and from 1961 to 1963 was chief deputy savings and loan commissioner of California. Before those appointments, Scott was in private practice with the firms of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York and Musick, Peeler and Garrett in Los Angeles. He earned an AB in economics in 1949 from the College of William and Mary and attended Princeton University as a Woodrow Wilson fellow, receiving an MA in political science in 1953. He graduated from the Stanford Law School in 1956 with an LLB and is a member of the state bar in New York, California, and the District of Columbia.