China's rapid growth in the absence of autonomous legal institutions of the kind found in the west appears to pose a problem for theories which stress the importance of law for economic development. In this article we draw on interviews with lawyers, entrepreneurs and financial market actors to...

Is Chinese commercial law simply a copy of German and other Western commercial laws, a “mystery” that Westerns cannot understand, or an “irrelevance” given the role of culture and politics in China? This article critically discusses these three modes of understanding. It is found that,...

In 2005 the European Union adopted a Directive on Cross-Border Mergers, which Member States have to implement until 15 December 2007. This Directive is not only interesting for European lawyers because it addresses general problems of cross-border mergers and could therefore also become an...

This article deals with the question of whether a spouse who grants a security for the business debts of the other spouse can escape liability because he or she has not been properly advised by the creditor. After an introduction into this topic, I outline the legal position in English, Scots...

Soon we can expect a new type of company: the European Private Company (Societas Privata Europaea – SPE) aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises in the EU. In this article, we analyse how creditors of future SPEs will be protected. In the first part, we identify on a general level how...

In the growing literature on comparative corporate law there is often a lack of consideration to the recent advances made in the general field of comparative law. This chapter aims to fill this gap. It outlines a conceptual framework that shows how seven core themes of comparative law can be...

In this Article, we intend to fill a gap in the comparative law literature by adopting a case-based approach to comparative corporate law that highlights the important dimension of specific cases in corporate law matters and how identifiable, but limited issues arising from such case disputes...

How different are common law and civil law legal systems? This question has occupied legal scholars for a long time. In the last 15 years the common law/civil law divide has also become a major theme in research of economics, finance and business. In many studies it is alleged that English legal...

This paper uses a new quantitative methodology ("numerical comparative law", "leximetrics") in order to answer the questions whether there has been convergence, divergence or persistence of legal rules, and how this relates to the Common Law/Civil Law distinction. It is based on indices for...