FACULTY
Faculty Profile
Full-time Faculty, Associate Dean for Faculty & Curriculum
William W. Clayton
Professor of Law
William Clayton is a business law scholar whose work focuses primarily on the law and policy of private markets. He is a leading contributor to the emerging legal literature on private equity fund contracting and governance. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Duke Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, Yale Journal on Regulation, and Harvard Business Law Review, and he is also a contributing author to multiple handbooks on private equity and venture capital. He has been invited to present his work to federal policymakers and leading industry organizations, and his scholarship has been cited in rule-making, comment letters, and amicus briefs relating to private investment funds. Before joining the BYU Law faculty, he worked as a corporate lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and as a private funds lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City. He also served as Executive Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.
Clayton currently serves as a director of BYU’s Global Business Law Program, where he has organized conferences including the BYU Law Winter Deals Conference in Park City and the Private Funds Roundtable in New York City.
He teaches courses on contracts, business organizations, and corporate finance. He is also the founding director of the BYU Law Deals Academy, an annual immersive transactional law program in New York City for first-year students. BYU Law’s first travel academy, the Deals Academy served as an early model for the law school’s broader academy program, which Bloomberg Law ranked among the top dozen most innovative national law school programs in 2023 and 2024.
In 2025, Clayton received a university Early Career Scholarship Award for scholarly achievement.
He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a B.A. from Stanford University, where he played outside hitter on the NCAA men’s volleyball team.
Additional Information
Articles and Book Chapters
- Private Equity for All: The Paradoxical Push to Democratize Private Markets, Duke Law Journal (forthcoming) (with Elisabeth de Fontenay) [SSRN]
- Moelis and Private Equity in the Public Market, Yale Journal on Regulation (2026) (with Gladriel Shobe and Jarrod Shobe) [SSRN]
- “Private Equity Fund Bargaining: What We Know (and Don’t Know)” in Elgar Research Handbook on the Structure of Private Equity and Venture Capital (invited chapter, forthcoming 2026) [SSRN]
- “Private Equity Negotiations,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Private Equity (invited chapter) (Douglas Cumming & Benjamin Hammer eds. 2024) [SSRN]
- High-End Securities Regulation: Reflections on the SEC’s 2022-23 Private Funds Rulemaking, 14 Harvard Business Law Review 71 (2024) [SSRN]
- High-End Bargaining Problems, 75 Vanderbilt Law Review 703 (2022) [SSRN]
- How Public Pension Plans Have Shaped Private Equity, 81 Maryland Law Review 840 (2022) [SSRN]
-Selected for reprint in the Securities Law Review and Corporate Practice Commentator [SSRN] - Public Investors, Private Funds, and State Law, 72 Baylor Law Review 294 (2020) [SSRN]
- The Private Equity Negotiation Myth, 37 Yale Journal on Regulation 67 (2020) [SSRN]
- Preferential Treatment and the Rise of Individualized Investing in Private Equity, 11 Virginia Law & Business Review 249 (2017) [SSRN]
SEC Comment Letters