PROFESSOR SARAH WILLIAMS WRITES FOR THE COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL BLUE SKY BLOG

Sarah WilliamsOctober 2022 — Professor Sarah J. Williams accepted an invitation from Columbia Law School’s blog on corporations and the capital markets to submit a conversational summary of her upcoming article, “Regulatory Personhood: The Elixir for Redundancy Between the SEC and the PCAOB.” Her blog submission was published on their website and is available online.

Professor Williams was invited by the CLS Blue Sky Blog to submit a short piece summarizing her work in her second article on the topic of oversight of auditors of public companies. Her first article, “The Alchemy of Effective Auditor Oversight,” published in February 2022, explored the manner in which oversight authority attaches to accountants opining on the financial statements of public companies. The blog post summarizes the research and findings of her second article, “Regulatory Personhood, The Elixir for Redundancy Between the SEC and the PCAOB,” which identifies “regulatory personhood” as a neutralizer of the resource waste and in-fighting that might otherwise appear when two agencies share enforcement authority.


Professor SarahWilliams is an Assistant Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law; her research focuses on the intersection of federal securities regulation and accounting. Prior to joining Dickinson Law, Professor Williams practiced law as a securities regulator. She was Deputy Director at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and Associate General Counsel at NASD, now FINRA. She spent several years at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, serving as staff attorney and branch chief in its Division of Enforcement, then as Counsel to SEC Commissioner Isaac C. Hunt, Jr. Professor Williams began her legal career as an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C.