In his keynote address to the annual conference of the Insolvency Practitioners Association of Australia (IPAA), October 2006, Justice Austin reviews the law concerning the fiduciary duties of external administrators, especially voluntary administrators appointed under Part 5.3A of the...

Australia will become the world's largest LNG producer by 2018. This Chapter explores the development of the Australian LNG industry. It then analyses some of the legal and commercial issues currently being experienced by the Australian LNG industry. In particular, it will evaluate the legal...

The convergence/divergence debate at the turn of this decade was often underpinned by the assumption of a unified and cohesive common law governance model, which would (or, for path dependence theorists, would not) form the point of convergence of corporate governance regimes around the...

In this conference paper Justice Austin describes current Australian trends in corporate workouts, where a financier such as a bank wishes to assist a corporation in financial difficulty, without making use of any process of external administration. He identifies some legal pitfalls in informal...

This article considers how the current High Court of Australia is approaching the issue of commercial construction of contracts by considering several recent cases. The article argues that the High Court has not taken advantage of opportunities to develop the concept of commercial construction....

This paper details the development of an important part of Japan's legal landscape, hitherto little written about in English: the roles and functions of Japan's corporate legal departments and their staff (in-house counsel). After sketching their evolution first as Japanese corporations began...

This paper seeks to understand what is to be regulated in market failure. Where the paper benefits but diverges from Polanyi’s analysis is to explore the global self-regulatory markets of today and to suggest that his differentiation of fictitious from socially-sustained (embedded) market...