Scholars, as a breed, are often wary of journalists. The law school’s James Cox, a specialist in corporate and securities law, however, never seems to tire of them.
A member of the Duke School of Law faculty since 1979, Cox has distinguished himself in many ways beyond his growing reputation as a business media darling. The Brainerd Currie Profesor of Law has testified before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, completed a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Sydney and won an Association of American Publishers 1995 National Book Award for Law. His work has taken him all over the globe where he has advised within an impressive variety of law systems and cultural contexts—from China and Thailand to Bosnia, Chile and Saudi Arabia.
It is no surprise, then, that Cox is one of Duke’s most oft-quoted academics. Cox proves little help at unraveling the mystery of his popularity with the media.
“I think that’s thanks to a lot of skullduggery and financial markets. I also have a big mouth,” he said.
Cox’s popularity as a media pundit only began with the recent rash of fraud in corporate financial governance. It was not until the scandals began to dominate the news in 2001 that Cox began to get airtime. “For years I’d spent time talking to the press and [was] never quoted,” he noted.
From that point onward, he describes his appeal to business journalists as having “snowballed.” He has worked with such media luminaries as Alec Klein, reporter for The Washington Post and best-selling author, as well as New York Times legal correspondent Stephen Labaton, whose investigative reporting partially instigated the Election Night resignation of Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Harvey Pitt in 2002. Labaton, Law ’86, joined Cox for a discussion of corporate ethics at the Fuqua School of Business in November 2002; the two spent the evening analyzing contemporary SEC scandals in terms of their respective backgrounds.
This is Cox’s usual role with reporters. He is most often called upon to provide extensive legal background for a situation, to interpret facts and then to suggest other experts willing to do the same thing. When Cox provided background and factual insight for Klein’s July 2002 stories on AOL Time Warner’s “cooking of the books,” the reporter had contacted him as early as March of that year. “[That was] literally hours and hours and hours and hours of phone conversation,” Cox said.
Despite the hours spent talking with reporters, he insists that he never tires of it. “That’s part of teaching,” he shrugged. And it’s Cox’s passion for teaching that seems to set him apart from many of his colleagues in the classroom as well as the media.
“He expects a lot out of his students, but I think he’s justified, and I think he gives a lot in return, too,” said Eliza Kendrick, Law ’04.
Getting away from work seems to be a tricky conundrum for Cox, yet one that does not particularly worry him. For example, after he had just finished testifying to the House and Senate on matters of insider trading in 1988, he took the year-long position as Senior Research Fulbright Fellow in order to “go over to Australia and relax for a bit.”
Instead of relaxing, he quickly became involved in the Australian Parliament’s investigation into insider-trading laws, moving from one law system to another. In addition to his work with Parliament, he gave talks at 17 universities and a plethora of professional groups. “It made a nice footprint for Duke, me being there,” he mused.
If Cox is concerned with making footprints, he has managed to leave them in a variety of countries so disparate—both legally and culturally—that there is no chance of anyone narrowing his expertise to one field. In China and Thailand, he led training programs for corporate regulators. He has participated in law reforms in Bosnia, Chile, Denmark and will soon do the same in Vietnam. He even served as consultant on capital market laws for the king of Saudi Arabia.
Yet he does not sees his international work as any unusual calling nor charitable impulse, but rather as a simple inevitability. “I think it’s hard to be an academic without having gotten caught up in international forces; the world’s just shrinking,” he said.
Although becoming an academic in the largely professional field of law is rare among his legal peers, Cox seems to shrug this off too. It was something he’d decided in his first semester of college, writing home to his mother. “If I could spend the rest of my life on a college campus, I’d feel a great success,” he said.
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