Oxford Business Law Blog

Why don’t we see more regulatory arbitrage? What constrains it? Regulatory arbitrage refers to structuring activity to take advantage of gaps or differences in regulations or laws. Examples include...

Once upon a time, in a far simpler world, corporations and their shareholders had a direct relationship with each other. Corporations could follow any change in shareholdings directly from the share...

In 2006, the world was shocked when thirteen-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide after being told, by a fake user on the social networking platform Myspace, that the world would be better off...

Delaware is home to more than half of all public corporations, and its market share among initial public offerings is even higher. Not surprisingly, therefore, an extensive body of literature is...

Debt restructuring is an issue that has come to prominence in the twenty years since Centros, in large part due to the difficulties faced by companies in the aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial...

In April 2018 the European Commission presented a proposed directive on cross-border mobility which includes a new legal process for cross-border conversion. The JURI committee of the European...

In mid 2017, having paid little attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) beyond noticing that it had replaced “globalisation” as the focus of ambitious middle class conversation, my inbox started to...

2019 marks the ten-year anniversary for the Spector-decision, where the European Court of Justice determined that when an investor is in possession of inside information while trading, it can be...

Law firms don’t just go bankrupt – they collapse. Dewey & LeBoeuf; Bingham McCutchen; Heller Ehrman; Howrey; Thelen. All of these firms and many others have disappeared with extraordinary...

Shocks that hit part of the financial system, such as the subprime mortgage market in 2007, can propagate and amplify through the complex network of interconnections among financial and non-financial...

One of the issues which has bedevilled agreement at EU level on mechanisms which might allow a company to alter its applicable corporate law (without changing anything else) is the potential impact...

In the past 30 years, defaults on corporate bonds have been substantially higher than the historical average. Dividing the years from 1970 to 2016 into two equal periods, the default rate of US...

Digital platforms play a central role as facilitators of online interactions and transactions between users. In particular, ‘two-sided platforms’ – which operate, for instance, e-commerce...

It has been twenty years since the European Court of Justice issued its decision in Centros Ltd. v. Erhvervs - og Selskabsstyrelsen (Centros). Since that time, Centros has been widely understood as...

India introduced the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (‘IBC’) in 2016 with a view to encourage quick and efficient corporate rescue and restructuring. It follows a UK style ‘insolvency professional in...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) often refers to ‘companies voluntarily going beyond what the law requires to achieve social and environmental objectives during the course of their daily...

March 2019 marked the twentieth anniversary of the landmark Centros case. It was the first of three judgments in which the (then) European Court of Justice (the Court) affirmed companies’ freedom of...

The 2008 financial crisis set off a major debate about the role of accounting for financial stability. Politicians, policymakers and commentators were quick to point to fair-value or mark-to-market...

Although international commercial arbitration has long been considered the preferred means of resolving cross-border business disputes, recent years have seen multiple initiatives seeking to disrupt...

In our new working paper entitled ‘The Future of Data-Driven Finance and RegTech: Lessons from EU Big Bang II’ we argue that 2018 marked an important point in the evolution of finance: a Big Bang of...

Recent technological developments require a reconsideration of intermediated securities holding systems. This post presents two recent papers that examine aspects of this issue. Current intermediated...