Oxford Business Law Blog

Many scholars have called for legal reform to end taxpayer-funded bailouts and crack down on anticompetitive practices by financial institutions. Failure to do so, in an era of fintech innovation,...

In ‘Pari Passu Undone: Game-Changing Decisions for Sovereigns in Distress’, which appears in Issue No. 3 of the ‘Cleary Gottlieb Emerging Markets Restructuring Journal’, published by Cleary Gottlieb...

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...

Hyperfunding is the fundraising of large sums of money in a brief campaign by a company that directly targets consumers or investors via the Internet. In my latest research paper, Hyperfunding, I...

In the UK, directors, as fiduciaries, are subject to duties and constraints to ensure they act in the interests of the company. One of these is the proper purpose rule, now codified in section 171(b...

In a recent paper, published in The Journal Jurisprudence, I attempt to explain how common-law jurisdictions developed the distinctive notions of equity that are largely absent from civil law and to...

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...

For creditors, insolvency proceedings hold the promise of a peaceful afterlife. If their debtor fails to satisfy their claim, an impartial liquidator will take over and, to the extent possible and in...

With the Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) being bailed out by the Italian taxpayer, push comes to shove: Are post-crisis reforms working? First and foremost, this concerns the innovative...

Predictive capabilities created by big data and artificial intelligence increasingly allow parties to draft contracts that fill their own gaps and interpret their own standards without adjudication...

The increasing separation of physical and virtual identities driven by anonymity in the crypto-economy challenges the existing jurisdictional means over virtual transactions involving blockchain...

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...

The previously emerging principle of implied good faith continues to struggle to find a sympathetic audience in the Court of Appeal. In 2016 we discussed the Court of Appeal's negative reception to...

Recent legal scholarship on the platform economy – also known as the sharing economy – often invokes the term ‘disruptive innovation’ to suggest that these new forms of business organization require...

In our study we analyze a large sample of non-US public firms from 31 countries that obtain private loans. We find that loan syndicates lending to borrowers that employ Big N auditors are larger and...

One of the most controversial remedies in private law is that of punitive (or exemplary) damages. According to Ernest Weinrib, the remedy is ‘encased in controversy’. Punitive damages are extra-...

A brief summary of the case For the purpose of this note, the case (C-106/16) may be summarised as follows. Polbud — Wykonawstwo sp. z o.o. (‘Polbud’) is a private limited liability company...

Ashfords' Guide to Unfair Prejudice Against Shareholders (which can be found here) explains that grounds for bringing an unfair prejudice petition include the awarding by the majority shareholder to...

Contracts with states are an omnipresent feature of the global financial system, underlying all sovereign debt obligations. It may therefore come as a surprise that, until recently, the English...