Hillary Sale

Professor Hillary A. Sale is an award-winning teacher, a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. She teaches courses on Leadership, Women and Leadership, and Corporate Law and Governance. In the spring of 2017, she was the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she taught Women’s Leadership and Corporate Boards and Governance.

She is an expert on and frequent speaker to industry groups and academic audiences about leadership and corporate governance and was selected by the St. Louis Business Journal as a “2014 Most Influential Business Women.” In addition to running leadership and other programs in industry, Professor Sale has taught in multiple executive education programs, including the Harvard Law School Law Firm Leaders Program and various programs through the Washington University Olin School of Business.

Professor Sale is a member of the FINRA Board of Governors, where she serves on the Nominating and Governance, Compensation, and Regulatory Operations Committees. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Foundation Press, and the Advisory Board of DirectWomen, a nonprofit with the mission of increasing the presence of women on public company boards. She is Chair of the DirectWomen Board Institute and also works in industry training executives on leadership, governance, and risk management.

Professor Sale is a leading scholar in the areas of corporate governance and the role of corporate and securities law in shaping board decision-making and strategies and has authored many award-winning articles. Professor Sale is co-author (with John C. Coffee, Jr. and Charles K. Whitehead) of the book Securities Regulation and is a member of the Committee on Corporate Laws of the ABA, where she co-chaired the task force for the Sixth Edition of the Corporate Director’s Guidebook. Professor Sale is also a Fellow of the American College of Governance Counsel.

Before entering academia, Sale was a law clerk to The Honorable Richard S. Arnold, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, practiced with the law firm of WilmerHale LLP, and was Chief of Staff and Director of Operations for Evelyn F. Murphy, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1993 and holds a master’s degree in Economics from Boston University, where she also completed her B.A., summa cum laude in 1983. From 1997-2009, she was a member of the University of Iowa College of Law, where she was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law, and from 2009-2018, she was the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and a Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis.