More and more companies appear with strange abbreviations behind their business name. Consider Chrysler Group LLC (instead of Inc.) or LVMH Montres & Joaillerie France SAS. Some even speak about the 'endangered corporate form' and point to the rise of the uncorporation. This Primer examines how...

A significant debate rages within the EU about whether to give firms the choice to opt in or out of corporate law provisions. Both sides agree that more flexibility and adaptability of legal rules to business needs is crucial. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, many still view EU mandatory...

The paper describes the European Model Company Law Project. Last year, a commission was formed on the initiative of the authors with the goal of drafting a European Model Company Law Act (EMCLA). This project aims neither to force a mandatory harmonization of national company law nor to create a...

The developments of company law in countries belonging to five legal families illustrate the principle-agent conflicts that company law faces and the range of solutions it offers to cope with them. Comparative company law is about learning from each other's experience in a competitive way, and...

European Company Law has been experiencing rapid development in recent years. In 2003 the European Commission published a first action plan on the further integration of company law in Europe: Modernising Company Law and Enhancing Corporate Governance in the European Union - A Plan to Move...

When Council Regulation (EC) No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European Company (Societas Europaea - SE) became effective on 8 October 2004, it offered publicly traded companies, for the first time, a choice between competing company laws, namely the national law of the company’s home state...

In recent years, the emphasis in corporate governance has shifted from board composition, independent directors, separating the position of chairperson and CEO, and establishing board committees to “being in control” and risk management issues. However, the corporate law perspective of...

A central goal in devising a system of courts is to make judicial services easily accessible. As a consequence, justice is usually administered in a geographically decentralized fashion: trial courts are distributed across the territory in which the jurisdiction's law is applied. Corporate law,...

The dialogue of the board and its chairman with investors is an established practice in many countries, such as the United Kingdom, the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and recently also Germany. In the UK this dialogue covers the whole range of relevant board topics, certainly including...

We revisit debates on the regulation of IPOs by analyzing failure rates of IPOs carried out between 1900 and 1913 on the London and Berlin stock exchanges, two of the leading financial markets during the early 20th century. IPOs were regulated more heavily in Germany than in Britain and, as...