Inspired by Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” (2007) I analyse the thought experiment of a world in which law professors suddenly vanished. First, without academic teachers legal training would shift back to the legal professions. Purely professional law schools would provide...

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...

This paper uses a new quantitative methodology (quot;numerical comparative lawquot;, quot;leximetricsquot;) in order to answer the questions of whether there has been convergence, divergence or persistence of for shareholder, creditor, and worker protection, and how this development relates to...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...