Oxford Business Law Blog

In a highly anticipated decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a U.S. bankruptcy court order dismissing a chapter 11 case filed by a corporation (once one of the largest...

American bankruptcy law allows unsecured creditors to drag a debtor into bankruptcy by filing an involuntary petition, but they almost never do. Using data from the Federal Judicial Center, we find...

My new paper, Secured Credit and Effective Entity Priority addresses a puzzle in bankruptcy and secured transactions law regarding the scope of security interests. Under existing law, security...

It is often said that transactions made on the blockchain are immutable: once the transaction is done, it is done. And in principle they are indeed immutable. Aside from security breaches, changes to...

Collective redress on behalf of consumers has been debated for long in Europe and Germany. The ‘Dieselgate’ scandal has brought another occasion to advance the discussion. Both Germany and Europe are...

Large investors often have market power in private equity markets, such as in venture capital, growth capital, or private placements. The conventional wisdom is that powerful investors can flex their...

Since 2015, a storm has raged in Germany in the worlds of cars and politics. The regulation of exhaust emission cleaning systems for diesel motors has not led to the attainment of targets for reduced...

One of the mysteries in life is how different jurisdictions can be faced with the same legal problem and manage to come up with the same wrong answer. Case in point. Both English and American...

2018 is the first year in history when more than half of the world’s population is online. Since its dawn, the Internet has changed many aspects of daily life. The first wave of the Internet saw a...

A common objective for many bankruptcy systems in developed countries is to provide a ‘fresh-start’ for the debtor. Often, this goal is seen as particularly important for entrepreneurs and those...

After the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its long-awaited decision in Slovak Republic v Achmea BV (C-284/16) in March 2018, there has been significant debate regarding its...

Will crowdfunding ‘democratize’ investing and make startup capital available to a wider range of founders? Our preliminary study suggests that equity crowdfunding is not providing its expected...

The most important function of judges is to decide cases brought to them by litigants. By contrast, they are not commonly seen as participants in a market for litigation, competing to ‘sell’ their...

Introduction and Background The English Court of Appeal has recently decided a case about sovereign debt. Russia holds the debt - bonds with a face value of US$ 3bn, issued in December 2013. In 2014...

The prospect of Brexit has led a number of countries on the European continent to take measures designed to make their civil justice systems more attractive for international litigants. In Germany,...

My recent book Ombudsmen and ADR: a comparative study of informal justice in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) is about how ordinary people experience part of the informal justice system. My focus is...

In a forthcoming paper in the European Review of Private Law, I discuss the European Commission's proposal for a directive regarding the modernization and better enforcement of European consumer...

On 11 September 2018, the European Court of Justice (‘ECJ’) heard arguments in Google, Inc. v CNIL, a case that concerns the territorial scope of European data protection law. Among the questions...

In our paper, ‘Creditor Governance’, we investigate the degree to which large creditors exert influence over borrower investment decisions, and whether creditor-influenced changes in firm policies...

Transaction avoidance rules are widely thought to be an important tool in the regulation of related party transactions entered into by an insolvent or near insolvent firm. Such rules offer direct...