Not long after he became a law professor, Robert Bartlett published a paper that revealed a blind spot in academic scholarship. Corporate theory had long held that public firms must manage the inherent conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders and that private companies, by comparison, must negotiate conflicts among investors.

But, using venture capital-backed companies as examples, Bartlett made clear in his 2006 article that both kinds of conflict can exist in the same company. And he was able to make this contribution to theory in part because of the years he spent practicing at one of the leading VC law firms.

“I was looking at the literature as a practitioner,” he says.

Bartlett, who joined Stanford Law School in July as the W.A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, continues to bridge the gap between theory and practice across a range of issues in law and finance, including venture capital and private equity, securities regulation and market structure, corporate governance, and consumer and small business finance. At the University of California Berkeley School of Law, where he taught for nearly 15 years before joining Stanford, he co-founded Startup@BerkeleyLaw, a program that brought students, entrepreneurs, and investors together to learn and grow.

Bartlett plans to be a resource to law students and innovators at Stanford as well, including through the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, which he co-directs with Professor Colleen Honigsberg.

“The students at Stanford Law School were a huge selling point,” he says. “Their level of engagement is off the charts. And the opportunity to work with the entrepreneurial community at Stanford—which is legendary—is also very exciting.”

Honigsberg says Bartlett “is a fantastic teacher, a fantastic scholar, and a fantastic colleague.”

“He is unquestionably the leading legal academic in the VC area,” she says. “Most people have either taken a traditional research path or they have the more practitioner approach; Bobby is able to combine those, and that makes his scholarship so interesting and really relevant and helpful.”

In academia, Bartlett found a way to combine three of his passions in one pursuit. The Ohio native originally planned to be a high school history teacher, earning his degree in the subject at Harvard with that in mind. But a study-abroad experience at the University of Oxford exposed him to the world of international trade, and he attended law school with the goal of becoming a trade negotiator. A summer position at Gunderson Dettmer, which he joined in 2000 after graduating from Harvard Law School, steered him in the direction of startups. At the time, the dot-com bubble was still expanding.

“I completely caught the bug,” he explains.

Bartlett loved his work at the firm—he helped Shutterfly in its early days and regularly worked with VC firms on their investments and financing—but missed the research and writing he had done in law school.

“Trying to understand the world we live in is a big part of who I am,” he says. “When I was practicing, that was the aspect of myself I felt wasn’t really being fulfilled.”

A friend recommended he apply for a visiting professorship at Fordham University School of Law; he then spent several years at the University of Georgia School of Law before joining Berkeley in 2009.

Much of Bartlett’s work is empirical in nature; he often reveals flaws in our financial systems, including a lack of transparency in fractional share trading and advantages for traders who subscribe to proprietary data feeds. In 2022, he and three co-authors published a paper based on comprehensive loan-level data that showed Black and Latino borrowers pay more for their mortgages because of discrimination, even when loan decisions are made by algorithms rather than in-person lenders.

“It is very, very hard to have a really clean identification of discrimination in household finance,” he says. “Due to the institutional setting, this is one of the contexts where we can do it.”

All his work, Bartlett adds, is designed “to make sure markets are efficient, fair, and transparent.”

Justin McCrary, a frequent collaborator, former colleague at Berkeley, and current professor at Columbia Law School, says Bartlett is “a truly unique scholar” with “insatiable curiosity” and “an utter joy to be around.”

“Stanford is lucky to have snapped him up,” he says.  SL