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This is the long-awaited third edition of this highly regarded comparative overview of corporate law. This edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to reflect the profound changes in corporate law and governance practices that have taken place since the previous edition. These include numerous regulatory changes following the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the changing landscape of governance, especially in the US, with the ever more central role of institutional investors as (active) owners of corporations. The geographic scope of the coverage has been broadened to include an important emerging economy, Brazil. In addition, the book now incorporates analysis of the burgeoning use of corporate law to protect the interests of "external constituencies" without any contractual relationship to a company, in an attempt to tackle broader social and economic problems. The authors start from the premise that corporations (or companies) in all jurisdictions share the same key legal attributes: legal personality, limited liability, delegated management, transferable shares, and investor ownership. Businesses using the corporate form give rise to three basic types of agency problems: those between managers and shareholders as a class; controlling shareholders and minority shareholders; and shareholders as a class and other corporate constituencies, such as corporate creditors and employees. After identifying the common set of legal strategies used to address these agency problems and discussing their interaction with enforcement institutions, The Anatomy of Corporate Law illustrates how a number of core jurisdictions around the world deploy such strategies. In so doing, the book highlights the many commonalities across jurisdictions and reflects on the reasons why they may differ on specific issues. The analysis covers the basic governance structure of the corporation, including the powers of the board of directors and the shareholder meeting, both when management and when a dominant shareholder is in control. It then analyses the role of corporate law in shaping labor relationships, protection of external stakeholders, relationships with creditors, related-party transactions, fundamental corporate actions such as mergers and charter amendments, takeovers, and the regulation of capital markets. The Anatomy of Corporate Law has established itself as the leading book in the field of comparative corporate law. Across the world, students and scholars at various stages in their careers, from undergraduate law students to well-established authorities in the field, routinely consult this book as a starting point for their inquiries.
The investor-owned corporation is the conventional form for structuring large-scale enterprise in market economies. But it is not the only one. Even in the United States, noncapitalist firms play a vital role in many sectors. Employee-owned firms have long been prominent in the service professions--law, accounting, investment banking, medicine--and are becoming increasingly important in other industries. The buyout of United Airlines by its employees is the most conspicuous recent instance. Farmer-owned produce cooperatives dominate the market for most basic agricultural commodities. Consumer-owned utilities provide electricity to one out of eight households. Key firms such as MasterCard, Associated Press, and Ace Hardware are service and supply cooperatives owned by local businesses. Occupant-owned condominiums and cooperatives are rapidly displacing investor-owned rental housing. Mutual companies owned by their policyholders sell half of all life insurance and one-quarter of all property and liability insurance. And nonprofit firms, which have no owners at all, account for 90 percent of all nongovernmental schools and colleges, two-thirds of all hospitals, half of all day-care centers, and one-quarter of all nursing homes. Henry Hansmann explores the reasons for this diverse pattern of ownership. He explains why different industries and different national economies exhibit different distributions of ownership forms. The key to the success of a particular form, he shows, depends on the balance between the costs of contracting in the market and the costs of ownership. And he examines how this balance is affected by history and by the legal and regulatory framework within which firms are organized. With noncapitalist firms now playing an expanding role in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Asia as well as in the developed market economies of the West, The Ownership of Enterprise will be an important book for business people, policymakers, and scholars.
Providing an economic account of why trusts exist and how trust law should be shaped, this book explains the economic benefits of trusts as an extension of the law of property, arguing against accounts of trusts law grounded in the law of personal obligations. The theoretical model is then used to criticise recent developments in the law.
Professor Cheffins' lecture offers a path-breaking examination of potential trajectories for legal scholarship. Considerable attention is devoted to academic writing on law, but little has been said about the process by which the relevant literature evolves. This lecture focuses directly on the evolution of legal scholarship. It identifies five potential trajectories, revolving around concepts such as 'progress', 'paradigms', the marketplace for ideas, intellectual cycles, and fads and fashions. Professor Cheffins offers a summary of each trajectory and then tests the propositions he has advanced by means of a case study dealing with corporate law. He argues that scholarly trends in law develop in a manner that is at least partially consistent with each of the trajectories he identifies, but acknowledges that none captures fully the dynamics at work.
This book examines the limited liability business forms that have recently emerged, and seeks to identify the forces that have led to the emergence of new business forms for small and medium-sized businesses. Focusing on the US, UK, and continental Europe, the contributors analyse the Limited Liability Company, the Limited Liability Partnership, and the new business forms proposed in Europe.
Fiduciary law is a critically important body of law. Fiduciary duties ensure the integrity of a remarkable variety of relationships, institutions, and organizations. They apply to relationships of great personal significance, including in some jurisdictions the relationship between parents and children. They structure a wide variety of commercial relationships, and they are essential to the regulation of relationships between professional service providers and their clients, including relationships between lawyer and client, doctor and patient, and investment manager and client. Fiduciary duties, perhaps uniquely in private law, challenge traditional ways of marking the boundaries between private and public law, inasmuch as they figure prominently in public governance. Indeed, there is even a storied tradition of thinking of the authority of the state in fiduciary terms. Notwithstanding its importance, fiduciary law has been woefully under-analysed by legal theorists. Filling this gap with a series of chapters by leading theorists, this book includes chapters on: the nature of fiduciary relationships, the connection between fiduciary duties and morality, the content and significance of fiduciary loyalty, the economic significance of fiduciary law, the application of fiduciary principles to public law and international law, the import of fiduciary relationships to theories of authority, and various other fundamental topics in the field. In many cases, new and important questions are raised by the book's chapters. Indeed, this book not only offers a much-needed theoretical assessment of fiduciary topics, it defines the field going forward, setting an agenda for future philosophical study of fiduciary law.
Europe has known very different systems of company laws for a long time. These differences do not only pertain to the board structures of public companies, where single-tier and two-tier structures can be distinguished, they also pertain to the principles of fixed legal capital. Fixed legal capital is not a traditional ingredient of English and Irish company law and had to be incorpo-rated into these legal systems (only) for public limited companies according to the Second European Company Law Directive of 1976. Both jurisdictions have never really embraced these rules. Against this background, the British Accounting Standards Board (ASB) and the Company Law Centre at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) have initiated and supported a study of the benefits of this legal system by a group of experts led by Jonathan Rickford. The report of this group has been published in 2004. Its result was that legal capital was costly and superfluous; hence, the Second Directive should be repealed. The British government has adopted this view and wants the European Commission to act accordingly. Against this background a group of German and European company law experts, academics as well as practitioners, have come together to scrutinise sense and benefits of fixed legal capital and all its specific elements guided by the following questions: What is the relevant legal concept supposed to achieve? What does it achieve in reality? What criticisms are there? Which proposals or alternatives are available? From the outset the group of experts has endeavoured to cooperate with foreign colleagues, which resulted in very fruitful and pleasant exchanges. This volume contains, besides an executive summary of the results, 16 essays on specific aspects of legal capital in Germany covering also neighbouring fields of law (e.g. accounting, insolvency); 7 reports on fixed legal capital in other jurisdictions (France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.S.A.) addressing the same questions as the essays on German law. The British initiative disapproves of the Second Directive. The Directive does only deal with public limited companies in Europe, which is reflected in the analysis presented here. It is only concerned with the fixed legal capital of public limited companies, not with capital issues of private companies. The study has arrived at a result that differs completely from that of the Rickford group. It verifies the usefulness of the concept of fixed legal capital and wishes to convince the European Commission of the benefits of the Second Company Law Directive.
This Research Handbook considers many aspects of corporate liability, beginning with a fundamental explanation of what the company is, through depictions of corporate liability in theory, to the key areas of liability in practice. Interdisciplinary in nature, the contributions cover corporate and participant liability under statutory law, tort and criminal law, and corporate fiduciary and securities law. Specific perspectives include those on vicarious liability in tort and its application to corporations, and accountability for AI labour.
Ancient Rome is the only society in the history of the western world whose legal profession evolved autonomously, distinct and separate from institutions of political and religious power. Roman legal thought has left behind an enduring legacy and exerted enormous influence on the shaping of modern legal frameworks and systems, but its own genesis and context pose their own explanatory problems. The economic analysis of Roman law has enormous untapped potential in this regard: by exploring the intersecting perspectives of legal history, economic history, and the economic analysis of law, the two volumes of Roman Law and Economics are able to offer a uniquely interdisciplinary examination of the origins of Roman legal institutions, their functions, and their evolution over a period of more than 1000 years, in response to changes in the underlying economic activities that those institutions regulated. Volume I explores these legal institutions and organizations in detail, from the constitution of the Roman Republic to the management of business in the Empire, while Volume II covers the concepts of exchange, ownership, and disputes, analysing the detailed workings of credit, property, and slavery, among others. Throughout each volume, contributions from specialists in legal and economic history, law, and legal theory are underpinned by rigorous analysis drawing on modern empirical and theoretical techniques and methodologies borrowed from economics. In demonstrating how these can be fruitfully applied to the study of ancient societies, with due deference to the historical context, Roman Law and Economics opens up a host of new avenues of research for scholars and students in each of these fields and in the social sciences more broadly, offering new ways in which different modes of enquiry can connect with and inform each other.