Christina Sautter

Christina M. Sautter is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law and Co-Founder of the Center for Retail Investors & Corporate Inclusion (the RICI Center). A globally recognized scholar of retail investor rights, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions, her work sits at the intersection of capital markets, corporate law, and democratic participation. She examines how the structure of corporate law shapes the rights and voice of individual investors, and who gets systematically left out.

Professor Sautter has held distinguished visiting appointments at preeminent institutions across the United Kingdom and Europe. During the 2024–25 academic year, she was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Law School, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh Law School, and a Visiting Scholar at Dublin City University School of Law and Government. She has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Bocconi University School of Law in Milan (April–May 2025), where she taught doctoral seminars on U.S. securities law, corporate shareholding, retail investors, and M&A and related securities regulation. She will join the Università degli Studi di Milano (University of Milan) as a Visiting Professor of Law in April–May 2026.

Professor Sautter’s scholarship addresses some of the most consequential questions in modern corporate law: who holds meaningful power in corporate governance, and who is excluded from it. Her article “Corporate Disenfranchisement,” co-authored with Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci and forthcoming in the UC Irvine Law Review, introduces a theoretical framework for understanding how the structural evolution of corporate law has eroded the rights and voice of retail shareholders. Her earlier article “Corporate Governance Gaming: The Collective Power of Retail Investors,” published in the Nevada Law Review, examined the GameStop phenomenon and introduced the concept of the “wireless investor,” a new generation of retail shareholders who invest through digital platforms and source the bulk of their investing information online.

Her M&A scholarship centers on the sale process of publicly traded companies and the intersection of fiduciary duties and deal terms. She co-authored Mergers and Acquisitions Law, a hornbook published by West Academic Publishing.

Her articles have appeared in the Boston University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Florida Law Review, the Journal of Corporation Law, and other leading journals. She serves on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Securities Regulation.

Professor Sautter is a regular source for journalists covering corporate governance, securities regulation, and capital markets. Her scholarship and commentary have been featured by The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR Marketplace, Forbes, Fortune, USA Today, and other major outlets. She also serves as an expert witness in litigation involving corporate structure, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions.

Prior to joining SMU, Professor Sautter was a member of the faculty at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center from 2008 to 2023, where she held three named professorships: the Cynthia Felder Fayard Professorship, the Byron R. Kantrow Professorship, and the Vinson & Elkins Professorship. Before entering the academy, she practiced in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at the New York City offices of Shearman & Sterling LLP (now A&O Shearman), representing companies across industries in multi-million- and billion-dollar multinational transactions on both the buy side and sell side and advising boards of directors on corporate governance matters. She clerked for the late Honorable H. Emory Widener, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The RICI Center is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that brings Professor Sautter’s scholarly agenda to life, advancing financial and corporate governance literacy education and research to ensure retail investors have a meaningful voice in corporate America.