The integration of the European capital markets makes progress and has led both issuers and investors being active on various markets on both sides of the Atlantic. In times of financial crises, this brings one question into the centre of attention which had not been discussed exhaustively before: In the situation of a securities liability towards investors in an international context, which is the applicable law to the liability claim? The harmonisation of private international law rules in Europe gives rise to new reflections on the problem of international issuer liability. In the United States, on the other hand, the Supreme Court has just granted certiorari in a ‘foreign-cubed’ securi-ties class action case and will thus rule for the first time on matters relating to the inter-national application of the US securities regulation soon. This paper understands the role of issuer liability in a broader context as a ‘corporate governance’ device and, from this starting point, develops a new approach to the legal problem of cross-border securities liability.

In capital markets around the world, calls for greater transparency regarding holdings of cash-settled equity derivatives (in particular Contracts for Difference, CfDs) have arisen due to the increased use of CfDs to gain control or to influence the management of prominent companies on all major European stock exchanges. They have been used in this manner due to an emerging practice that permits a CfD holder to capture the shares to which the CfD arrangement relates (without entering into any further express or implied agreements to do so), thereby acquiring a de facto control position in the target company. The UK was among the first countries to extend its shareholder disclosure regime to cover CfDs. Positions above the trigger threshold of 3 per cent must be disclosed as if they were shares enti-tling the holder to voting rights in the target company. Two alternatives were considered when pre-paring this new regulation: firstly, a general disclosure obligation of all economic long positions and secondly, a safe harbour regulation with exemptions from the requirement to disclose certain CfD transactions. Ultimately, the first option was preferred, yet not on the basis of its own merits but be-cause the safe harbour alternative was considered too complicated and difficult to enforce. This paper evaluates disclosure regulation of cash-settled equity derivatives and assesses the ef-fectiveness and suitability of the disclosure regulation under chapter 5 of Disclosure and Transparency Rules (DTR) in the UK with comparison to the relevant US rules and case law. We argue that the UK made the wrong choice of disclosure regime for CfDs. It fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the underlying problem relating to CfDs. As this article explains, the key problem related to CfDs is not the economic interest which CfDs convey per se, but rather the hedging structures that market participants have developed to facilitate the use of CfDs to acquire control of companies by stealth. This particular mischief would have been better targeted by an intentions-based disclosure regulation requiring disclosure of CfD positions only in cases where the CfD holder intends to launch a takeover or to otherwise influence the target company’s strategy and operations. Instead, the UK market is saddled with a general disclosure obligation with only very limited exceptions. This disclosure obligation is too wide in scope, places an undue burden on market partici-pants and ultimately acts as a deterrent to CfD transactions. This article argues that the UK should move away from the current general disclosure obligation towards intentions-based disclosure to re-move the current fetter on the CfD market, while still tackling the underlying mischief.

The legal origins hypothesis is one of the most important and influential ideas to emerge in the social sciences in the past decade. However, the empirical base of the legal origins claim has always been contestable, as it largely consists of cross-sectional datasets, which provide evidence on the state of the law only at limited points in time. There is now a growing body of data derived from techniques for coding crossnational legal variation over time. This time-series evidence is reviewed here and is shown to cast new light on some of the central claims of legal origins theory. Legal origins are shown to be of little help in explaining trends in the law relating to shareholder protection, although the classification of legal systems into English-, French-, and German origin “families” has greater explanatory force in the context of creditor rights. The widely-held view that increases in shareholder rights foster financial development is not supported by time-series analyses. More generally, the new evidence casts doubt on the suggestion that legal origins operate as an “exogenous” force, independently shaping both the content of laws and economic outcomes. It is more plausible to see legal systems as evolving in parallel with changes in economic conditions and political structures at national level.

Much attention has been devoted in recent literature to the claim that a country’s ‘legal origin’ may make a difference to its pattern of financial development and more generally to its economic growth path. Proponents of this view assert that the ‘family’ within which a country’s legal system originated, be it common law, or one of the varieties of civil law, has a significant impact upon the quality of its legal protection of shareholders, which in turn impacts upon economic growth, through the channel of firms’ access to external finance. Complementary studies of creditors’ rights and labour regulation have buttressed the core claim that different legal families have different dynamic properties. Specifically, common law systems are thought to be better able to respond to the changing needs of a market economy than are civilian systems. This literature has, however, largely been based upon cross-sectional studies of the quality of corporate, insolvency and labour law at particular points in the late 1990s. In this paper, we report findings based on newly constructed indices which track legal change over time in the areas of shareholder, creditor and worker protection. The indices cover five systems for the period 1970-2005: three ‘parent’ systems, the UK, France and Germany; the world’s most developed economy, the US; and its largest democracy, India. The results cast doubt on the legal origin hypothesis in so far as they show that civil law systems have seen substantial increases in shareholder protection over the period in question. The pattern of change differs depending on the area which is being examined, with the law on creditor and worker protection demonstrating more divergence and heterogeneity than that relationg to shareholders. The results for worker protection are more consistent with the legal origin claim than in the other two cases, but this overall result conceals significant diversity within the two ‘legal families,' with different countries relying on different institutional mechanisms to regulate labour. Until the late 1980s the law of the five countries was diverging, but in the last 10-15 years there has been some convergence, particularly in relation to shareholder protection.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2009.00380.x

The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law jurisdiction-plays an important part in determining the development of its investor protection regulations, and consequently its financial development. An alternative theory claims that the determinants of investor protection are political, rather than legal. We use the case of India to test these theories. We find little support for the idea that India's legal heritage as a common law country has been influential in speeding the path of regulatory reforms and financial development. There is a complementarity between (i) India's relative success in services and software, (ii) the relative strength of its financial markets for outside equity, as opposed to outside debt, and (iii) the relative success of stock market regulation, as opposed to reforms of creditor rights. We conclude that political explanations have more traction in explaining the case of India than do theories based on 'legal origins'.

ISBN: 0023-9216

DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2009.01146.x

Using a panel data set covering a range of developed and developing countries, we show that common-law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil-law ones in the period 1995–2005. However, civilian systems were catching up, suggesting that legal origin was not much of an obstacle to formal convergence in shareholder protection law. We find no evidence of a positive impact of these legal changes on stock market development. Possible explanations are that laws have been overly protective of shareholders and that transplanted laws have not worked well in contexts for which they were not suited.

ISBN: 1740-1453

Shares in publicly-quoted UK companies are, similarly to those in their US counterparts, dispersed amongst many holders. The central problem of corporate governance for UK listed firms is therefore rendering managers accountable to shareholders. This paper investigates the way in which the mechanisms used to control these managerial agency problems are enforced. It provides a roadmap of the enforcement strategies employed, and a first approximation of their empirical significance. The results suggest three stylised facts about the UK corporate governance system. First, shareholder lawsuits are conspicuous by their absence. Formal private enforcement plays little or no role in controlling managers. Secondly, and contrary to leading accounts in the economic literature, it is public, rather than private, enforcement which dominates in relation to listed companies. However, the lion's share of the interventions by the relevant agencies - the Takeover Panel, the Financial Reporting Review Panel, and the Financial Services Authority - is of an informal character, not resulting in any legal action. Suasion, rather than sanction, is the order of the day. Thirdly, a simple divide between public and private enforcement fails fully to take account of the role played by institutional investors in the UK, who have engaged systematically in informal private enforcement activity. Strong informal private enforcement has historically therefore been the flipside, in the UK, of weak formal private enforcement.

This collection of essays is a festschrift to honour Professor Dan Prentice who retired in 2008 from the Allen & Overy Professorship of Company Law in the University of Oxford. Dan Prentice has been deeply involved in corporate law from all perspectives: as a scholar, teacher, law reformer and practising member of Erskine Chambers. His interests have covered the full range of corporate law, finance and insolvency. The occasion of his retirement from his Professorship has afforded a number of leading corporate law experts from around the world, many of whom are his former students and colleagues, an opportunity to address some of the most important issues in corporate law today, in his honour. Corporate law has always been a fast-moving area, but the present pace of change seems quicker than ever. The Companies Act 2006, by some way the longest piece of legislation ever passed by the UK Parliament, is reshaping the landscape of domestic company law. At the same time, legislative and judicial developments at the European level in corporate and securities law are of unprecedented importance for corporate lawyers based in the UK. This outstanding series of papers addresses a number of the most important issues currently facing the subject, including the impact of the new Companies Act on directors' duties, shareholder litigation and capital maintenance; aspects of insolvency and banking regulation, the Capital Requirements Directive, and a new Convention on Intermediated securities. It will be essential reading for all those interested in the field.