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...

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,...

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...

This paper contains the tables of contents, legislation and cases, the introduction and the index of a book published by Cambridge University Press (2008). The cover text reads as follows: "On the one hand, it can be argued that the increasing economic and political interdependence of countries...

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...

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...

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...

Has there been convergence of corporate governance systems? There has been a great deal of controversy on this issue in the last ten years, and it is likely that this debate is to re-emerge in the context of the current financial crisis. In this paper I use a new quantitative methodology...

Harmonisation and legal convergence are core tasks of the European Union. This article explores the question about the determinants for national convergence of EU law, specifically applied to the ever-growing body of European consumer sales law. The measurement of national convergence is based...