Casimiro Nigro

Profile

I am currently a Lecturer in Business Law at Leeds University, where I teach courses related to corporate finance, corporate law, and corporate governance and lead the module on Corporate Finance and Securities Law.

Previously, I was at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where I was responsible for teaching Comparative Corporate Governance and Law, Start-up Governance (the Law & Finance of), and Private Equity & Venture Capital Contracting (the Law & Economics of). I have also taught similar courses at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome for many years, as well as seminars on corporate law-related subjects at Perugia University.

Over time, I have been invited to teach corporate law-related classes and courses at Stanford University, Vienna University, Madrid University, Barcelona University, Reichman University, as well as several Italian universities.

Before joining academia full-time, I worked in international law firms, reaching the role of Counsel in a corporate law-related department, where I advised on high-profile corporate transactions, including capital raising through equity crowdfunding platform. In that capacity, I have also provided advice on the draft regarding PMs’ initiatives aimed at reforming Italian corporate law and contributed to consultations instrumental to the lawmaking process.

Research interests

My research, which is highly interdisciplinary in nature, primarily focuses on (comparative) corporate governance and law, and on the governance of close corporations, especially startups, M&A law and takeover law. Presently, I am engaged in a project that explores the intersection of corporate law and venture capital investments. This project aims to present a comprehensive theory of the corporate law-venture capital nexus and provide the first comprehensive map of the regulatory constraints that German and Italian corporate laws impose on contracting parties attempting to adopt the best real-world private ordering solutions to address the problems affecting the venture capitalist-entrepreneur relationship.

To date, my research has been featured, or is in the process of being featured, on the Harvard Forum on Corporate Governance, the Columbia Blue Sky Blog, the Oxford Business Law Blog, and Promarket. It has also been featured in the popular press via, for instance, Forbes and Il Sole 24 Ore. Over the years, it was included in the programme of top finance, law, and finance-law conferences across Europe and the U.S. It has also won prestigious international prizes, including “best paper prize” at the 2023 John L. Weinberg/IRRCi Research Paper Award at the “2023 Annual Corporate Governance Symposium” organized by The John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance and the Department of Finance at the Lerner College of Business & Economics at the University of Delaware in collaboration with the European Corporate Governance Institute.

My outputs predominantly reflect his focus on the research topics mentioned above. Notable working papers and publications include, among others: 

• “Venture Capital Contracting in Continental Europe: Bargaining in the Shadow of Corporate Law Constraints” (2025) (with Luca Enriques and Tobias H. Tröger);
• “Can U.S. VC Contracts Be Transplanted into Europe? Systematic Evidence from Germany and Italy” (with Luca Enriques and Tobias H. Tröger);
• “Mandatory Corporate Law as an Obstacle to Venture Capital Contracting in Europe: Implications for Markets and Policymaking” (with Luca Enriques and Tobias H. Tröger) (forthcoming in the Elgar Research Handbook on the Structure of Private Equity and Venture Capital (Brian Broughman & Elizabeth De Fontenay eds., 2025);
• "No Private Ordering Please, We Are Italian!” (with Luca Enriques) (forthcoming in The Italian L.J., 2025);
• “Building an EU Venture Capital Market: What about Corporate Law?”, in: Gabriella Gimigliano and Valentino Cattelan (Eds), Money, Law, Capital, And The Changing Identity Of The European Union, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2022, 165 (with Alperen A. Gözlügöl);
• “Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups” (with Bo Bian and Yingxiang Li);
• “Venture Capital-backed Firms, Value-destroying Trade Sales, and Fair Value Protections” (2021), 22 Eur Bus Org LR 39 (with Jorg R. Stahl).

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Business Law and Practice
• Legal Professions Research Group