The Legal Basis Of Corporate Governance In Publicly Held Corporations

This book is the result of a project sponsored by Ceradi-Luiss Guido Carli, Rome, and by the Brooklyn Law School Center for the Study of International Business Law.

Comparative Corporate Governance considers the effects of globalization on corporate governance issues and highlights how, despite these widespread consequences, predictions of legal convergence have not come true. By adopting a comparative legal approach, this book explores the disparity between convergence attempts and the persistence of local models of governance in the US, Europe and Asia.

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.

The concept of corporate governance has come under intense public scrutiny in recent years. Business people everywhere are asking: What exactly does and‘goodand’ corporate governance entail? Which aspects of it are legally binding, and in what ways is it merely a set of expectations on how corporations should be organized ideally? Nowhere are these important questions answered more precisely - nowhere are the lines more clearly drawn - than in the insightful synthesis of statutory law, case law, and organizational theory presented in this book. Recognizing that the concept of and‘goodand’ corporate governance is not dramatically different from one jurisdiction to another but represents an international phenomenon that has to a reasonable extent the same characteristics everywhere, the author proceeds, with detailed analysis, through a series of issues that (he shows) make up the brunt of corporate governance. Each of these issues in turn gives rise to such specific problem areas as the following: board compensation and executive compensation; unitary and dual board structures; monitoring management; legal parameters of and‘mismanagementand’; the and‘supervisory gapand’; audit, selection and appointment and remuneration committees; director tenure and retirement policy; risk management and risk reporting; corporate safety culture; conflicts of interest; whistleblower arrangements; aims of the regulation of public takeover bids; and defensive tactics in case of a hostile public takeover bid. These problems - and many others - are examined in the light of corporate governance codes and guidelines and of reports and judgments that deal with specific instances where investigators or courts were asked to analyze corporate governance issues in concrete cases. Each of the ten chapters includes in-depth analysis of such cases. A special feature of the book is a set of model corporate governance guidelines based on US corporate practice. Corporate Governance as a Limited Legal Concept is remarkable for its very thorough characterization and definition of corporate governance as a legal concept, as a code of conduct, and as an organizational structure. The authorand’s clearly reasoned analysis of the legal limits of corporate governance will be of great interest and practical value to business people and their counsel in any jurisdiction.

Over recent decades corporate governance has developed an increasingly high profile in legal scholarship and practice, especially in the US and UK. But despite widespread interest, there remains considerable uncertainty about how exactly corporate governance should be defined and understood. In this important work, Marc Moore critically analyses the core dimensions of corporate governance law in these two countries, seeking to determine the fundamental nature of corporate governance as a subject of legal enquiry. In particular, Moore examines whether Anglo-American corporate governance is most appropriately understood as an aspect of 'private' (facilitative) law, or as a part of 'public' (regulatory) law. In contrast to the dominant contractarian understanding of the subject, which sees corporate governance as an institutional response to investors' market-driven private preferences, this book defines corporate governance as the manifestly public problem of securing the legitimacy – and, in turn, sustainability – of discretionary administrative power within large economic organisations. It emphasises the central importance of formal accountability norms in legitimating corporate managers' continuing possession and exercise of such power, and demonstrates the structural necessity of mandatory public regulation in this regard. In doing so it highlights the significant and conceptually irreducible role of the regulatory state in determining the key contours of the Anglo-American corporate governance framework. The normative effect is to extend the state's acceptable policy-making role in corporate governance, as an essential supplement to private ordering dynamics. Shortlisted for The Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2013.

This book examines the legal duties of Directors Of Public Companies in the light of the stakeholder approach to the firm. It considers the theory that directors are not simply agents of corporate shareholders,but have a duty to take into consideration and, where appropriate, balance the interests of several constituencies, each of which has a legitimate stake in the company, its activities and its development. This book is essentially the first to relate the stakeholding arguments and Third Way politics, as popularised by commentators such as Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, to the prospects for reform of company law in an authoritative but accessible format. It is an ideal text for company law, business and politics students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, and will also provide companies with a straightforward and welcome guide to this often complex area, particularly to the important issues of accountability and regulation.

This report evaluates the extent to which the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance have been implemented in Turkey, looking at both the legal and regulatory framework as well as company practices.

Like its companion the Corporate Director's Guidebook, this new title covers topics in plain English so the principles are easily understood by nonlawyers