Oxford Business Law Blog

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...

Previous research on shareholder voting has placed most of the emphasis on the role of institutional shareholders. In our recent study, Managerial Reliance on the Retail Shareholder Vote: Evidence...

A Call for Papers is inviting contributions to the Cambridge Handbook of Corporate Law, Corporate Governance and Sustainability. Those tentatively selected to contribute will be invited to a...

Way before the 2008 financial crisis, high-profile cases against directors such as the Equitable Life Assurance Society v Bowley [2003] BCC 829, caused the realisation that directors are under...

The edited collection, The Changing Landscape of Corporate Law in New Zealand (The Centre for Commercial and Corporate Law, Inc, 2017), draws together New Zealand and international contributors who...

Law is full of vague standards; legally relevant facts are frequently unclear; sanctions and damages are often uncertain; and the likelihood of detection is rarely known precisely. In our forthcoming...

The corporate governance spotlight, at least in some circles, has often been on directors and shareholders. Today, the classic problems of some holding ‘other people’s money’, or the ‘separation of...

Boards of directors, all over the world, are connected. Directors simultaneously sit on different boards and firms share directors with other firms. A substantial amount of literature has shown that...

In a new paper, Criminally Bad Management, I take on the problem of the relationship between managers of large corporations and crime, and pursue an argument that, perhaps surprisingly, leads to a...

The ‘one-share one-vote principle’ is one of the most fundamental rules in modern corporate law. However, in reality, controlling shareholders often obtain voting rights in excess of their economic...

Due to climate changes, population growth and environmental degradation, the quest for sustainability ranks high on the political agenda. As a consequence, the question whether company law should be...

China is recognised as the second largest economy in the world behind the US in terms of GDP, and as the largest by reference to purchasing power parity. It now has the second largest number (95) of...