Oxford Business Law Blog

The Bitcoin blockchain has just forked into two rivaling chains; the same split happened to the Ethereum blockchain after its hard fork of July 2016. The development of these, and other,...

The private ordering of corporate governance arrangements is a wonderful thing. It ‘allows the internal affairs of each corporation to be tailored to its own attributes and qualities, including its...

Investment managers owe fiduciary duties to clients, including a duty of loyalty and a duty of care. A persistent question, with no clear answer, is what precisely is required by the duties of...

The creation of the mutual fund will go down as one of the greatest innovations in financial history. It has provided tens if not hundreds of millions of unsophisticated and uninformed stock market...

In this chapter on boards for Elsevier’s Handbook of Corporate Governance, edited by Benjamin Hermalin and Michael Weisbach, I argue that boards of directors are intellectually interesting; the...

In this article, we examine a general question: is the legal transplantation of corporate governance rule effective in curtailing agency costs? Entering into the 21st century, we have seen reforms of...

In a recent paper that we have published in the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, we investigate the role of foreign shareholders in improving the quality of accounting information provided...

What explains the growing number of collisions and collaborations between law and entrepreneurs? How are startups responding? What are some of the implications of these developments? I explore these...

In its preliminary ruling of 22 June 2017, the ECJ held that the Dutch pre-pack does not come under the derogation in Article 5(1) of Directive 2001/23.The reasoning of the ECJ will have important...

With the non-frustration rule (‘NFR’) and the mandatory bid rule, the Takeover Bid Directive contains two principles which have strongly influenced British takeover law for approximately 50 years...

Technological shocks, import competition, and shifts in regulatory policies lead with increasing frequency to radical change in economic environment and major industry shakeouts. Whether firms...

On 13 April 2017, the German Parliament enacted a ‘Statute for a Simplified Treatment of Group Insolvencies’. It will enter into force on 21 April 2018 and will supplement the prescriptions of the...

Recent years have seen burgeoning global interest in temporary (sunset) legislation - statutory provisions enacted for a limited amount of time, after which they expire, unless their validity is...

In a recent article, ‘Piercing of the Corporate Veil for Evasion of Tort Obligations’, I analyse the common law doctrine of veil piercing in the context of tort liabilities of a company. In the tort...

Earlier this week, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”) charged Barclays, its former CEO, and three other former top executives with criminal fraud. The prosecution stems from a long-...

It has long been argued that strengthening creditor rights facilitates firms’ access to credit financing, leading to larger credit markets and fostering economic growth (La Porta et al. 1997, 1998)...

Financial regulatory institutions are at the centre of intensive debates surrounding the regulatory tools to supervise financial firms and markets. There is also an important and growing body of...

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...

Twenty-five years ago, UK industry was reeling from a string of corporate collapses whose names still resonate: Polly Peck, Coloroll, BCCI, and, of course, Maxwell. Those failures put the UK on a...