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Professor Ventoruzzo to speak on corporate governance at Harvard Law School


UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State Law professor Marco Ventoruzzo will compare U.S. and Italian processes for making appointments to corporate boards of directors at a speaking engagement at Harvard Law School on Feb. 12.

His talk, “Directors’ Nomination Processes in the U.S. and Italy,” is sponsored by the Harvard Italian Law Association. Mark J. Roe, David Berg Professor of Law at Harvard, will introduce Ventoruzzo and serve as discussant.

Ventoruzzo will highlight and compare two relatively new systems for directors’ elections: the U.S. proxy access rule, which allows shareholders to place nominees for corporate boards on companies’ annual proxy statements, and Italy’s process of list voting, in which shareholders vote on predetermined groups of directors rather than individual nominees. Both voting processes are designed to allow minority shareholders, especially institutional investors, to appoint representatives on the board.

“The Italian experience, while obviously based on a different economic framework, including more concentrated ownership structures, and a different legal tradition, is a fairly unique one worldwide,” Ventoruzzo said, “and one that large institutional investors are considering quite attentively.”

His talk will also include highlights of a few other jurisdictions’ board election procedures.

More information on his talk is available on the Harvard Italian Law Association’s website.

Ventoruzzo is the Arthur L. and Sandra S. Piccone Faculty Scholar at Penn State Law and holds a joint appointment with Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.

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