“Offensive shareholder activism” involves buying up sizeable stakes in underperforming companies and agitating for changes predicted to increase shareholder returns. Though hedge funds are currently highly publicized practitioners of this corporate governance tactic, there has been no...

After a brief period during the financial crisis when countries appeared to be lurching towards economic nationalism, the international community has reaffirmed its commitment to open markets that are regulated in balanced ways that promote innovation while discouraging abuse. Hence, it remains...

An important tenet of a burgeoning 'law and finance' literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and...

A 1970 New York Times essay on corporate social responsibility by Milton Friedman is often said to have launched a shareholder-focused reorientation of managerial priorities in America's public companies. The essay correspondingly is a primary target of those critical of a shareholder-centric...

The last decade or so has witnessed a proliferation in the introduction of corporate organisational constructs to facilitate social enterprise across many European jurisdictions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this phenomenon, and provide an (initial) analytical framework through...

This chapter examines and challenges the dominant academic portrayal of Anglo-American corporate law as an aspect of private law, and argues for a re-characterisation of the subject that reflects the centrality of public regulation to its core dynamics. It first explores the purported...

This case note discusses Case C-270/12 United Kingdom v European Parliament and Council [2014] (not yet reported), regarding certain powers of the European Securities and Markets Authority under the Short-Selling Regulation

This paper review empirical studies examining the economic effects of laws governing the formation, financing and organisation of business firms with the aim of putting the UK experience in a comparative perspective. The literature identifies two models of legal support for manufacturing which...

We review the role of economic theory in shaping the process of legal change in Russia during the two transitions it experienced during the course of the twentieth century: the transition to a socialist economy organised along the lines of state ownership of the means of production in the 1920s,...

While issues that prompt corporate governance responses are endemic to the corporate form, the term “corporate governance” only began to feature with any regularity in discussions of public companies in Britain as the 1990s got underway. It is well known that work done by the Committee on...