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...

For those concerned with nature and role of the business firm in economy and society, these are challenging times. Past and ongoing financial crises and scandals have focused attention on the system of regulation, governance and disclosure in a way many may never have imagined and few welcomed....

Dozens of judicial opinions have held that shareholders own corporations, that directors are agents of shareholders, and even that directors are trustees of shareholders' property. Yet, until now, it has never been proven. These doctrines rest on unsubstantiated assumptions. In this book the...

Artificial Intelligence (hereafter: AI) is transforming our everyday life in many important respects. The corporate realm is no exception. Many corporations cannot avoid facing the variety of issues raised by the increasing importance that AI plays within firms. Can an AI-based system be...

Since the emergence of the virtual currency Bitcoin in 2009, a new, Internet-based way of recording entitlements and enforcing rights has increasingly captured the interest of businesses and governments. The technology is commonly called ‘blockchain' and is often associated with a closely...

This chapter, forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law, situates corporations and corporate law theory within the nascent New Private Law movement. Most theorists allied to the New Private Law focus on fundamental private law and so, in turn, bodies of law addressed to singular...

The Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance (hereinafter ‘The Study’) was published on 30 July 2020 and is accompanied by a Commission Inception Impact Assessment and a consultation deadline of 8 October 2020. This is an add-on to the response given by a group of...

The theme of this essay, a commentary on two papers forthcoming in the same volume on “The Worlds of the Trust,” is that trust law is not a species of property law or contract law, but rather is a species of organizational law. Organizational law supplies a set of contractarian rules, some...

Real estate developments are typically conducted through the medium of business entities intended to shield its owners of individual liability. Corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships have traditionally been viewed as effective mechanisms to accomplish this outcome....

This interdisciplinary paper by a mathematician and a legal counsel, both from the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, discusses the potential impacts of the so-called “initial coin offerings”, and of several developments based on distributed ledger technology (“DLT”), on corporate...