Oxford Business Law Blog

The world is struggling to address the pressing challenge of climate change. As efforts for comprehensive regulation fall short in some leading countries, including the United States, many advocates...

In several common law systems, creditors of corporate debtors enjoy legal protections beyond what their contracts with those companies afford them in the form of vicinity-of-insolvency fiduciary...

The exposition of the law of fiduciary accountability has been negligently disintegrating for some time. I say negligently because the numerous departures from principle that presently agitate the...

The permissibility of corporations pursuing purposes other than profit has been the subject of debate for a number of years. This debate has intensified recently with proposals from bodies such as...

The problems in global financial markets are often similar, even though the capital market structure across jurisdictions differs significantly. The beginning of the 21st century was marked by a...

The typical structure of corporations with multiple classes of stock consists of multiple classes of preferred stock and one or more types of common stock. These structures are most commonly used in...

A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia seeks to reconceptualise the role of shareholders in listed companies as one that should include fiduciary duties, particularly the duty...

By many accounts, we have entered an era of unprecedented contentiousness in debtor-creditor relations. For an example of the new status quo, consider the recent actions of PetSmart, a perfectly...

In the United States, investment advisers to mutual funds (mutual fund advisers), exchange traded funds, and separately managed accounts are typically delegated the authority to vote their clients’...

In the United States, a significant majority of business entities incorporate in Delaware. That state’s law, therefore, applies in a great deal of litigation attacking actions taken by corporate...

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational...

When are banks fiduciaries of their customers and clients? This question is of more than theoretical interest given the organizational structure of modern financial institutions and the broad-ranging...

In February 2016, the CEO of BlackRock Inc., Laurence Fink, issued his annual letter to the CEOs of S&P 500 corporations. In this letter, three specific requests were made. The first was that...

What’s not to like about a broad set of principles that guide investor stewards in their responsibilities to their pension fund beneficiaries or investors? For example, the Investor Stewardship Group...

China’s private equity industry is expanding at an unprecedented pace and has now become the world’s second largest and Asia’s largest private equity market in terms of fundraising amount. As of 2016...

The duty to act in good faith in the interests of the company (now the duty to promote the success of the company in s 172 Companies Act 2006 (UK)) is the central fiduciary duty of company directors...

American courts routinely pay homage to Benjamin Cardozo’s classic statement in Meinhard v. Salmon (1928) that fiduciaries owe their beneficiaries a ‘duty of the finest loyalty’ that is ‘stricter...

Fiduciary duties are foundational for institutional investors. The interpretation of these duties frames investment time-horizons, strategies and objectives, and defines those features of the...