About

Stephen Choi is the Bernard Petrie Professor of Law and Business at NYU School of Law, where he also serves as the Director of the Pollack Center. He joined NYU Law faculty in 2005, having previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and the University of Chicago Law School. Choi graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School in 1994, where he also served as a legal methods instructor and was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his PhD in economics from Harvard in 1997. His research interests focus on the theoretical and empirical analysis of corporations and capital markets, with particular emphasis on corporate law, empirical legal scholarship, judicial performance, law and finance, and securities regulation. Choi has published extensively in leading law reviews and has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, including the Fay Diploma, the Sears Prize, and the Irving Oberman Memorial Award. His work includes the development of empirical databases and courses related to securities regulation and corporate law, contributing significantly to the academic and practical understanding of securities enforcement, judicial impact, and financial regulation.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Political Science
• Finance
• Actuarial science
• Industrial organization
• Labour economics
• Economy
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Law

Selected publications

• Gurus and Novices

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Five confronts the challenge of traditional theory that holds that landmines should not exist, and certainly not persist. To begin building a theory that explains landmines, the book describes a set of over fifty interviews with the gurus of the sovereign bond market. The gurus were given a set of landmine examples together with a data summary of their presence in the market, and asked to help explain how it was possible for these to exist. Multiple explanations emerged. The most significant was the fact that some lawyers writing these contracts are experts and others are novices. The production of these contracts is done in a time-constrained fashion; there is little time for anyone but an expert to do much repair. Context dictates whether lawyers have an opportunity to coordinate on standard language, and that the original source document has a canonical, almost sacred, status that deters deleting language that is inapt.

  PublisherDOI

• Roadside Asset Extraction from Mobile LiDAR Point Cloud

  2025-08-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Mobile LiDAR systems are powerful tools that help us map roads and their surroundings in 3D with great speed and precision.The data provided by these systems support urban planning efforts, digital mapping, transportation infrastructure maintenance, and more. This report presents a comprehensive workflow for roadside asset extraction using Mobile Terrestrial Laser Scanning (MTLS) data, focusing on road lane detection, cross-section slope analysis, and point cloud classification. Roadside asset extraction is the identification and classification of roadside features like signs and poles. The dataset, acquired using a high-resolution mobile LiDAR system, contains over 5.7 billion points (pieces of data) across 68 LAS files. Preprocessing of the data involved tiling, merging, and denoising processes to enhance data quality. This research used two types of image-like maps— one showing elevation and one showing how reflective the surface is—to model the road and identify lane markings. Furthermore, the team developed and trained an AI-driven deep learning-based classifier program using a PointNet-style architecture implemented in PyTorch to segment ground and non-ground features. The classifier was trained using over 500 million labeled points and applied to new LAS files for inference. The model achieved effective binary classification performance and produced classified LAS outputs compatible with downstream GIS workflows. This means the program was able to successfully sort features into two categories—like ground vs. non-ground—and produce files that work with common mapping software. This work demonstrates the feasibility of combining traditional feature extraction with modern deep learning approaches to enhance automation and accuracy in infrastructure mapping.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Appendix

  2025-11-10

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prevalence and Persistence

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Eight moves beyond stories to ask what does the empirical data show on the prevalence and persistence of landmines. The chapter describes two samples of bonds, one from the sovereign debt market’s inception (1990–1995) and one from its mature stage (2020–2022). This examination reveals numerous instances of harmful landmines that persist both broadly and over time throughout the hundreds of bonds that were sampled—some were deliberate changes to standard language, others were blatant drafting errors, and yet others were inapt terms carelessly imported from corporate transactions. The data show that, consistent with the earlier stories, landmines differ from each other in important respects: deliberate changes to the standard form reflect strategic lawyering on behalf of sovereign clients, while errors that only benefit subsequent activists reflect haste in adapting precedents to new transactions. A reason for the persistence of landmines, the chapter surmises, is a lack of pricing of landmines at the time of issuance.

  PublisherDOI

• Trump’s Lower Court Judges and Religion: An Initial Appraisal

  The Journal of Legal Studies · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  It is widely believed that President Donald J. Trump’s first-term judicial appointments reflect a strategy of appeasing evangelical Christians and other religious groups that favor a more conservative, Christian judiciary and that in pursuing this strategy Trump sacrificed quality. We explore this theory by examining the biographies and credentials of Trump’s lower court nominees and the voting records of his circuit court appointments in free-exercise cases. We find that Trump’s appointments to the lower courts have stronger or more numerous religious affiliations and are affiliated with the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association at high rates but are no less well credentialed than other judges. We also find that Trump’s circuit court appointments more frequently vote in favor of Christian plaintiffs and less frequently vote in favor of Muslim plaintiffs in free-exercise cases than judges appointed by other Republican presidents and by Democratic presidents. Hugh Hewitt: “Will you commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint, not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts?” Donald Trump: “Yes, I would.” (New York Times 2016)

  PublisherDOI

• A Visit from Gandalf

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter One shows how blunders and obsolete contract terms can be weaponized in the hands of a skilled lawyer. Greece, in 2011, was on the brink of default. In late 2011, Lee Buchheit, one of the gurus of sovereign debt came to visit a class on International Finance that one of us was teaching. The goal was to introduce students to the design of cross border debt contracts. But the result of Lee’s visit, and specifically of using a Greek sovereign bond contract as exemplar, was a quite different discussion than the one we had had planned. In the context of a likely need for Greece to soon restructure its debt, what Lee showed the students and visiting professors in the class was that embedded deep in the contract were multiple obsolete terms that could be exploited.

  PublisherDOI

• Uncovering the M&A Network

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Twelve explores further into the M&A world to better understand how the network of elite M&A lawyers engineers contract change. We know from the prior chapter that the M&A bar operates differently, and more effectively, in responding to the detection of landmines in the standard package of terms than in the public bond context. The chapter explores how M&A guru, Glenn West, and other elders in the M&A market coordinate to repair landmines such as the “fraud carve out” clause. Unlike the sovereign debt world, the M&A bar (and particularly its private equity subset) has developed a network to build connections among a group of elite lawyers from different firms that enables landmines to be examined, studied, and then, for the most part, repaired much faster than in other markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Landmines

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Two tells the stories of four exemplars of hazardous contracts from debt crises for Argentina, Venezuela, Greece, and Sri Lanka. As the authors continued to do research on various sovereign debt crises, they collected stories of flawed contract provisions that had subsequently been weaponized in unexpected fashions. These flawed terms were labeled “landmines.” As the stock of stories of these landmines accumulated, it became clear that they were both numerous and not all of the same type. One of these landmines, a “subversive accretion,” had been embedded strategically to gain a subsequent advantage; another was an “historical holdover” that had been imported from a different market when the form contract first evolved or was an obsolete term attributable to drafters’ failure to properly revise and update the agreements for each transaction; yet others were “errors,” flaws that likely resulted from careless drafting..

  PublisherDOI

• Landmines and Incomplete Contract Theory

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Seven builds a theory from the interviews with sovereign debt gurus to explain how and when contractual landmines arise and persist. The data on standard form sovereign bond contracts suggested four categories of landmines: First, are a large number of purposeful, but marginal, changes to well-understood standard terms (“subversive accretions”) that give the debtor leverage should it attempt to restructure its debt. Second, are errors that likely arise randomly from novice attorneys drafting contracts without fully understanding the sovereign context. Third, are “historical holdovers”: terms and concepts introduced when the current standard form contract was evolving from corporate transactions. Armed with what the gurus asserted, the chapter asks how their narratives fit the academic theory of incomplete contracts. It suggests that the views of the gurus and regnant theories of incompleteness can be harmonized by accepting the truth of the assertion that the market for sovereign bond lawyers is divided between experts who both drafted contracts and engaged in restructuring negotiations and novices who only work at the drafting stage. This asymmetry, coupled with the misaligned incentives between lawyers and their clients, provides an explanation for why landmines can exist in equilibrium in a competitive, liquid market.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Pari Passu</i> and the Evolution of a Landmine

  2025-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter Four expands the scope of the landmine problem by tracing the evolution of the infamous pari passu clause in sovereign bonds. This evolution shows how a landmine can persist over time and even evolve in new and equally hazardous ways. Pari passu was, and is, a clause that is literally present in every international sovereign bond contract, and while its function is understood by few, it presents an ever-present and continuing risk of exploding in litigation. Indeed, it has already blown up; in a case that brought Argentina to its knees and resulted in a multibillion dollar paycheck for an activist hedge fund.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mitu Gulati

  84 shared

• Eric A. Posner

  78 shared

• Adam C. Pritchard

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  71 shared

• Jill E. Fisch

  University of Pennsylvania

  59 shared

• G. Mitu Gulati

  43 shared

• Robert E. Scott

  34 shared

• Marcel Kahan

  28 shared

• Jessica Erickson

  University of Richmond

  27 shared

Labs

• Pollack Center for Law & BusinessPI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1997

• B.A.

  Harvard Law School

  1994

Awards & honors

• Fay Diploma
• Sears Prize
• Irving Oberman Memorial Award
• John M. Olin Fellowship
• Jacob K. Javits Fellowship