Depaul Business Law Journal

The purpose of this book is to honour the influential and wide-ranging work of Professor Hugh Beale. It contains essays by twenty-five very distinguished authors, each of whom has worked with Professor Beale as a co-author, as a teaching colleague, during his time as Law Commissioner of England and Wales, or as part of the study groups working in Europe on contract and commercial law. The essays reflect different aspects of Professor Beale's interests. Some concentrate on English contract law, either from a historical or a current perspective, while others are focused on aspects of European contract law. There are four essays looking at current issues relating to security and financing, and, as befits a former Law Commissioner, three essays on law reform. The essays in the final section discuss trends in transnational and European commercial law. This book brings together the reflections of eminent writers from all over Europe on important issues facing contract and commercial law and will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners working in these areas.

This book addresses core issues of personal property law in Nigeria from a comparative perspective. It offers a detailed account of the laws governing personal property and the different lightweight reforms undertaken mainly through case law before the enactment of the Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act in 2017. The book draws insights from the United States UCC article 9, being unarguably the first law that introduced the concept of modern secured transactions law, and was influential to many common and civilian law systems in reforming their personal property laws. Given that personal property law is fairly new in Nigeria, and also in Africa in general, the main aim of the book is to provide judges and academic researchers with a rich collection of tested solutions from jurisdictions that have experimented with modern secured transactions law for several decades. The primary and secondary works that were referenced in the book have tracked the different epochal shifts in legal thinking and their significances. This may assist scholars and judges in Nigeria to come up with bespoke interpretations of the Act and solutions to underlying problems on credit and security, that will satisfy the local conditions as opposed to copying the unaltered solutions from the United States and other advanced systems.

Comprising essays specially commissioned for the volume, leading scholars who have shaped the field of corporate law and governance explore and critique developments in this vibrant and expanding area and offer possible directions for future research. This important addition to the Research Handbooks in Law and Economics series provides insights into subjects such as the role of directors, shareholders, creditors and employees; empirical studies of litigation and shareholder activism; executive compensation; corporate gatekeepers; comparative law; and behavioral approaches to law and finance. Topics are organized within five sections: corporate constituencies, insider governance, gatekeepers, jurisdiction, and new theory. Taken as a whole, the volume serves as an introduction for those new to the field and as a reference for those unfamiliar with some of the topics discussed. Authoritative and accessible, the Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners of corporate law and economics.

This is the long-awaited second edition of this highly regarded comparative overview of corporate law. This edition has been comprehensively updated to reflect profound changes in corporate law. It now includes consideration of additional matters such as the highly topical issue of enforcement in corporate law, and explores the continued convergence of corporate law across jurisdictions. The authors start from the premise that corporate (or company) law across jurisdictions addresses the same three basic agency problems: (1) the opportunism of managers vis-à-vis shareholders; (2) the opportunism of controlling shareholders vis-à-vis minority shareholders; and (3) the opportunism of shareholders as a class vis-à-vis other corporate constituencies, such as corporate creditors and employees. Every jurisdiction must address these problems in a variety of contexts, framed by the corporation's internal dynamics and its interactions with the product, labor, capital, and takeover markets. The authors' central claim, however, is that corporate (or company) forms are fundamentally similar and that, to a surprising degree, jurisdictions pick from among the same handful of legal strategies to address the three basic agency issues. This book explains in detail how (and why) the principal European jurisdictions, Japan, and the United States sometimes select identical legal strategies to address a given corporate law problem, and sometimes make divergent choices. After an introductory discussion of agency issues and legal strategies, the book addresses the basic governance structure of the corporation, including the powers of the board of directors and the shareholders meeting. It proceeds to creditor protection measures, related-party transactions, and fundamental corporate actions such as mergers and charter amendments. Finally, it concludes with an examination of friendly acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and the regulation of the capital markets.