Legal scholars often classify countries into ‘legal families’. The research on ‘legal origins’ refers to this literature; yet, it then goes further as it uses distinct categories into which each country’s law is allocated in quantitative studies. Today, this line of research, which goes...

The seminal paper by La Porta et al. on ‘Law and Finance’ empirically examined whether there is a causal link between high levels of shareholder protection and financial development. Subsequent studies of this ‘Law & Finance School’ also addressed many further legal topics. This chapter...

The Judgment of the European Court of Justice (Grand Chamber) of 22 November 2022, ECLI:EU:C:2022:912 in the Joined Cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, WM and Sovim SA v. Luxembourg Business Registers has spurred some strong reactions. According to some, it “will leave fraudsters rubbing their hands...

Recent literature discusses how “menu laws” allow corporations to opt into one of multiple competing statutory regimes. This paper contributes to this literature by presenting original empirical research on the choice between corporate board models. Today, many countries not only allow...

After 30 years of debate, the law on the European Company (Societas Europaea, SE) has now come into force. Yet, its success could be doubted, because the regulation and the directive on the SE provide only some basic provisions and refer frequently to the law of the Member States. In this...

Should courts consider cases from other jurisdictions? The use of foreign law precedent has sparked considerable debate in the United States, and this question is also controversially discussed in Europe. In this paper and within the larger research project from which it has developed, we study...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This paper shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...

When directors are in breach of their duties, it seems natural to give shareholders a claim for compensation. However, directors' duties are owed to the company, not shareholders individually. This raises the question of whether individual shareholders can sue for compensation on behalf of the...

We present evidence on the evolution of labour law in five countries (the UK, USA, Germany, France and India) using a newly-created dataset which measures legal change over time. The results cast light on the claim that legal origin, or the influence of common law and civil law regulatory...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...