Fiduciary Law

A Principled Pioneer of Corporate Law

The new Tamar Frankel Lecture is a living reflection of “the intellectual godmother of fiduciary rule.”

Now Frankel—dubbed “the intellectual godmother of the fiduciary rule” by The Wall Street Journal—marks another impressive milestone: an annual lecture endowed in her honor that celebrates her scholarship in corporate and fiduciary law and highlights the continuing relevance of corporate responsibility and ethical leadership.

As testament to Frankel’s influence as an educator, her former student and BU Trustee Nathaniel Dalton (’91) has named this new lecture series to celebrate her work. Dalton, who was also one of Frankel’s research assistants, remembers her as a direct communicator and a principled, logical thinker. “If your argument didn’t make sense, she would tell you that your argument didn’t make sense,” he says. Her scholarship has served him well, he says, noting that the fiduciary model at the core of her research “was literally a framework for how we managed relationships” at the global asset management company Dalton cofounded and led.

One of the aims of the Tamar Frankel Lecture is to promote ethics-driven leadership, accountability, and the public good, a mission closely tied to Frankel’s work. “An essential challenge of our time is we don’t have trust,” Dalton says. “There are so few broadly trusted sources. The question of how we rebuild trust and create trust is, I think, one of the key questions facing our society.”

Professor Ann Lipton, a scholar of corporate governance and corporations who holds the Laurence W. DeMuth Chair at the University of Colorado Law School, will give the inaugural Frankel Lecture. Lipton’s theoretical work on corporate governance and her focus on pressing political and social issues build on the foundation of Frankel’s research and knowledge. Lipton will speak Monday, November 24, 2025, at 12:45 pm in Barristers Hall.

Frankel, who turned 100 years old in July 2025, has been a pioneer in academic research on fiduciary law, the concept that brokers must act in the best interest of their clients rather than push inappropriate, commission-heavy investment products that benefit advisors. That idea seemed profound when Frankel described it in a 1983 article, but it gained traction and was instrumental in shaping U.S. Department of Labor regulations.

“This is the essence of fiduciary law,” Frankel told the Institute for the Fiduciary Standard. “It is an arrangement whereby somebody must give power or property to the other person. The problem is when someone receives money or power, temptation arises to maybe help oneself a little bit—or more—to this entrusted property. Law reduces the cost and the risk to those entrustors, the people who receive the service… so they will not be as exposed to the risk of the fiduciaries’ temptation.”

Born in 1925 in what was at the time British-controlled Palestine, Frankel was the daughter of the first president of Israel’s bar association. She immigrated to the US in 1963 and received her Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School the following year. Frankel continued her studies at Harvard while beginning her teaching career at BU Law in 1967. In a black-and-white photo from around that time, she is the sole woman in a sea of men in suits. Relegated to an office in the basement of the law library, she was unfazed by the snub. “I didn’t come to be accepted,” Frankel told a BU interviewer decades later. “I didn’t come to make friends, and I didn’t care if I didn’t belong.”

In her subterranean space, she drilled down on her research on variable annuities, a topic she chose for her dissertation because she knew little about them. “There are two ways you can react to not knowing,” Frankel told the Wall Street Journal. “One is to feel afraid of your ignorance, the other is to be consumed by the desire to understand. I felt almost drunk with how much I could learn.”

That passion to understand propelled her career and scholarship. Frankel received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) from Harvard Law School in 1972, a year after she became the first female BU Law professor to receive tenure. Among the books she authored are Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture at a Crossroads, Fiduciary Law, and Institutional Self-Regulation (Compliance). Frankel helped to redefine what responsibility and trust mean in the corporate world.

She lives out her strong values beyond the standards of corporate law through her collegial relationships. Fellow BU Law faculty member Professor Emerita Fran Miller, who began teaching alongside Frankel in 1968, has said she could not have thrived at BU without Frankel’s “rock-solid support.”

Recognized as a pioneering legal scholar, Frankel provided an oral history of her academic career for the American Bar Association’s Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, joining other legal legends—including Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who, like her, had entered the legal profession in the 1970s.

The Institute for the Fiduciary Standard, a nonprofit research and education institution, created the Frankel Fiduciary Prize in 2013 to honor people who have helped preserve and advance fiduciary principles in public life.

Frankel retired in 2018 at age 93, having spent more than five decades teaching generations of BU Law students. In recognition of her career achievements, former students shared fond memories of their professor, describing her as “accessible and encouraging.” Others noted Frankel’s “practical and passionate” approach to teaching.

Frankel’s enthusiasm for education and learning has never waned. She continued researching, writing, and teaching as an adjunct faculty member—and then added another accolade to a lengthy list: the Association of American Law Schools honored her with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her influence is reflected in her accomplishments: forging a path for women in legal academia, establishing the bedrock of fiduciary duty and corporate responsibility, and transforming the study and practice of corporate law.