The following post comes to us from Mathias Siems of Durham University and David Cabrelli of Edinburgh University, UK.
There has been an exponential growth in interest in comparative company law in recent years. For example, in the period from 2002 to 2011, no fewer than ten monographs or edited collections were published exploring this new field of enquiry. The burgeoning literature was mirrored by an increase in University Postgraduate courses or programs in comparative company law and corporate governance. Moreover, the dissolution of trade barriers and mass cross-border capital flows engendered by the forces of competition and globalization have necessitated legal practitioners to be conversant with the company laws of jurisdictions other than their own.
In Mathias Siems and David Cabrelli (eds.), Comparative Company Law: A Case Based Approach, Hart Publishing, 2013 (publisher’s website; introduction on SSRN) we have aimed to fill an important gap in this field. Existing books on comparative company law tend to focus on the institutional structure of the corporation but this approach risks overlooking specific cases and how the issues arising from disputes are resolved in different jurisdictions. For example, topics related to directors’ liability, creditor protection and shareholders’ rights may best be understood by analyzing how selected hypothetical cases would be solved in different countries.
