Tamar Frankel, Law Professor and Godmother of the Fiduciary Rule (b. July 4, 1925)

Tamar Frankel has been a professor of law at Boston University School of Law since 1968. She is the author of The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle: A History and Analysis of Con Artists and Victims, Fiduciary Law, Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture at a Crossroad, Investment Management Regulation, Securitization, and The Regulation of Money Managers. Her areas of scholarship include financial system regulation, fiduciary law, corporate governance, the Internet, and Space Law. A native of Israel, she has taught at Oxford University, Tokyo University, and lectured in Geneva and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and has consulted with the People's Bank of China. She has been a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

In 1968 as she was still studying to complete her dissertation, Frankel joined Boston University.  The field was so male-dominated that;, when she arrived as the law schools' first female professor, BU relegated her office to the basement of the library.  She will quite teaching when she turns 93 next July, although she will continue to research and write.  What accounts for her longevity?  "Caring less and less about what other people think," she says, "and more and more about questions you don't have the answers to." 

Currently a law professor at Boston University, Frankel still commutes to work five days a week and teaches two courses.  Frankel has been advocating that brokers should put their clients first for more than 40 years.  The BU School of Law announced in November 2017 that Professor of Law and Michaels Faculty Research Scholar Tamar Frankel has been selected to receive the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Law School’s (AALS) Section on Women in Legal Education.