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...

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...

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...

Since the US Supreme Court effectively closed the door to foreign, human rights related claims against businesses under the Alien Tort Statute, courts in the UK, Canada and beyond have seen an...

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...

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 analysis of corporate governance has been a strikingly one-sided affair. The focus has been almost exclusively on ‘internal’ checks and balances, namely scrutiny of executives by the board of...

Due to the rapid growth of passive indexing, three large fund families – Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street – are now the de-facto arbiters of U.S. corporate law controversies. In 9 out of 10...

As of 2017, 172 of America’s 200 largest companies, ranked by revenue, were publicly traded. Public company dominance of the corporate economy of the United States has existed for decades. There has...

All blockchains have rules that govern their operations. As blockchains evolve they may need to change their rules. Blockchain governance refers to the system in place through which decisions...

Common law jurisdictions pride themselves on having a keen sense of fiduciary relationships and the perils of self-dealing. While the UK’s influence on EU law may recede in the long run, it has left...

Law and technology-related research has arrived in the world of corporate law, as academics begin to tackle topics like artificial intelligence (AI), increasing automation and robots, Big Data, and...

The legal protection provided to creditors to enforce their contracts with debtors is central to the functioning of credit markets. These include the rights afforded to lenders in bankruptcy,...

One of the fundamental issues in modern corporate finance is the problem of separation of firm ownership from control. The gap between management and shareholders is potentially wide, and the danger...