I never had the fortune to meet Judge Ralph K. Winter (Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit), but I admired him from a distance. As a Yale law professor, he wrote many important articles, but is best known for his rebuttal to Willam Cary's race to the bottom theory. As a Second Circuit Judge, he wrote many influential corporate law opinions.
Sadly, I learned today that Judge Winter has passed away. The Wall Street Journal has an informative obituary.
Mr. Winter joined the Yale law faculty in 1962 and remained a full-time professor there until joining the appeals court in 1982. Especially during student uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, being a conservative at Yale could be trying. “I’ve been called a fascist because I believe in small government,” he said in a 2017 oral history at Yale Law School, “which shows either a misunderstanding of me or a misunderstanding of fascism.”
In the 1970s, he bucked conventional wisdom on corporate-governance law. At the time, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader was calling for federal chartering of large corporations. William L. Cary, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, argued for minimum federal standards. ...
In a 1977 article replying to Messrs. Cary and Nader, Mr. Winter insisted that state regulation was generally preferable to federal rules. Competition among states had reduced regulation, he said, but in a way that benefited shareholders by reducing compliance costs and making companies more profitable.
