Christina Sautter

Christina Sautter’s research interests lie in corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, and technology-powered investing. Her most current research explores the relationship between markets and corporations. It focuses on new generations of investors’ power to transform corporate governance, analyzing the role of technology and online communications as well as of generational features and affinities. Professor Sautter also has extensively written on M&A. Her M&A scholarship focuses 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. She also is the author of chapters in the “Research Handbook on Mergers & Acquisitions,” “Feminist Judgments: Corporate Law Rewritten,” and “A Research Agenda for Corporate Law."

She has authored articles appearing in Boston University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, The Journal of Corporation Law, and other leading journals. Her scholarship has been featured in and she has been quoted by newspapers, magazines, and blogs, including The Wall Street Journal; The Financial Times; USA Today; Yahoo!Finance; FoxBusiness; Bloomberg; Bloomberg Tax; Forbes; the University of Oxford, Oxford Business Law Blog (OBLB); The CLS Blue Sky Blog (Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and Capital Markets); The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance; the Business Law Prof Blog; TheCorporateCounsel.net Blog; and the CorpGov.net Corporate Governance Blog.

Prior to joining the SMU faculty, Professor Sautter was a member of the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center faculty from 2008 to 2023 where she held the Cynthia Felder Fayard Professorship, the Byron R. Kantrow Professorship, and the Vinson & Elkins Professorship. Professor Sautter practiced in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group in the New York City offices of Shearman & Sterling LLP, where she represented companies from a variety of industries in multi-million- and billion-dollar multinational M&A deals on both the sell side and buy side. She also provided on-going corporate governance advice to boards of directors. She clerked for the late Honorable H. Emory Widener, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She also served as a Westerfield Fellow at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Professor Sautter earned her J.D. from Villanova University School of Law, graduating summa cum laude. While in law school, Professor Sautter was a managing editor of the Villanova Law Review and was selected as a member of The Order of the Coif. She received her bachelor’s degree in both Multinational Business Operations and Marketing from Florida State University, graduating summa cum laude.