Oxford Business Law Blog

With talk of driverless companies and bots substituting for human beings on company boards either in part or completely, the spectre of a future controlled by entities devoid of human beings is upon...

It is now widely recognized that legal entity status fulfills important economic functions by separating a firm’s business assets and the personal assets of its founders, directors, or shareholders,...

Disclosure laws aim to ensure the reduction of information asymmetries and the accuracy of share prices, but their success is predicated on enforcement. My recently published article (also available...

On Friday 12 June, the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow (the Corporate and Financial Law Research group) jointly hosted a full-day webinar entitled ‘Does the global pandemic signal a paradigm...

On April 28, the Spanish Government approved Royal Decree-Law 16/2020 (‘RDL 16/2020’), passing a series of insolvency, refinancing, corporate and procedural measures. The purpose of the legislation,...

The default division of powers in Dutch company law allocates strong control rights to shareholders, including the power to appoint and dismiss board members and amend the articles of association...

Eric E Posner and E Glen Weyl recently stated in their book, Radical Markets, that ‘If we aspire to prosperity and progress, we must be willing to question old truths, to get at the root of the...

Corporate organisational constructs facilitating social enterprise have proliferated for the last decade across many European jurisdictions. In a recent paper (forthcoming in the Journal of Corporate...

The European Business Law Review issues a call for papers to appear in a special Issue in second half of 2020. Our theme is 'Technological Transformations and European Business Law'. We are...

In this article, I document and explain the pervasive influence of nationalist impulses in shaping corporate law around the world and throughout History—a phenomenon which I term “the grip of...

Judges, legislators, corporate practitioners, and scholars of business law all conduct their work based on some working conception of what “corporate law” is. Strangely, however, the question of what...

Ensuring sustainability is one of the grand challenges of our times, but nation-states are severely overstrained with this monumental task. Since states’ legislative power is limited, the suitable...

Corporate law is theoretically rich but historically poor. There is a ‘pre-history’ of corporate law that is prior to the discipline’s historical knowledge, horizon and imagination; a pre-history of...

Tronc Chairman Michael Ferro became the latest corporate executive to resign amid accusations of unwanted sexual advances when he stepped down from the helm of the newspaper publishing chain in mid-...

Top executives’ compensation (TEC) is a topical and sensitive corporate governance issue. This issue has probably been one of the most publicised along with the rise of shareholder activism, which is...

In the past few years, investors have begun to embrace the reality that academics have been championing for decades—that a broad-based passive indexing strategy is superior to picking individual...

The era of the US public corporation is in decline. Tectonic shifts in seemingly disparate regions of the corporate landscape are underway. Through the lens of a new theory of the firm, these...