Category Archives: Business Organisation
Robé, Seabrooke and Wigan, ‘What’s a Firm, What’s a Corporation, and Why Does It Matter?’
ABSTRACT To understand how corporate activity is changing our economies and societies, we need to distinguish how they organize through bodies of law. In general parlance, the words firm, corporation, and company are used interchangeably. This is a matter of convenience but masks how firms, as organizing units, articulate their activities through corporations as legal […]
Eva Micheler, ‘The Purpose of Corporate Legal Personhood: Unincorporated Associations as a Natural Experiment’
ABSTRACT Organizations are an empirically observable normative phenomenon. They are the source of social rules that shape human behavior and are, in this sense, real in their consequences. The law integrates organizations through asset partitioning and regulatory partitioning, both of which are available to incorporated and unincorporated organizations. Given that partitioning is not exclusive to […]
Ben Nichols, ‘The Business of Purpose Trusts’
ABSTRACT In an age of increased awareness around climate change, wealth inequality and employee well-being, many private business owners are rethinking the fundamentals of corporate ownership. This has prompted a rise in the popularity of long-term ‘purpose’ trusts as an alternative ownership strategy, particularly in the US. The recent decision in Fletcher’s Fields Ltd v […]
Chen, Chen and Sun, ‘The Anti-SLAPP Statutes and Corporate Environmental Policies’
ABSTRACT We examine whether legal protection for civic participation affects corporate pollution. Polluters may deter public discipline through strategic lawsuits. Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statutes mitigate this threat by enabling prompt dismissal and recovery of legal costs. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that enacting an anti-SLAPP statute in a state significantly reduces […]
Foo and Tjio, ‘Transactions That Place Assets Beyond The Reach of Creditors: El-Husseiny v Invest Bank PSC [2025] UKSC 4′
ABSTRACT The unique statutory provision that is section 423 of the Insolvency Act 1986, offering redress to creditors that have been, or potentially will be, prejudiced by fraudulent transactions entered into by the debtor, has recently been the subject of interpretation by the Supreme Court in El-Husseiny v Invest Bank. This asset recovery provision is […]
‘A Warning on Agentic AI’
Deborah DeMott, ‘When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency’, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (27 May 2026). Professor Deborah DeMott’s article ‘When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency’ is a much needed breath of fresh, cold air in the overheated, overhyped debates surrounding Agentic AI. […]
Iain MacNeil, ‘Directors’ Duties and Liabilities in Connection with Sustainable Supply Chains – a Common Law Perspective’
ABSTRACT This chapter explores the potential of directors’ duties in the UK as a driver for more effective oversight of human rights and environmental harm in global supply chains. It situates the analysis in the context of the adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in the EU and the evolution of Caremark litigation […]
Eva Micheler, ‘From Contract to Regulations for the Company: The Metamorphoses of the Corporate Constitution’
ABSTRACT This article examines the legal nature of the corporate constitution and argues that its traditional characterisation as a contract is historically accurate but no longer conceptually adequate. Two metamorphoses have been identified: the corporate constitution evolved from the deed of settlement into a private statutory instrument under the Companies Acts, and at incorporation it […]
Rauterberg and Sanga, ‘No Limited Liability for AI’
ABSTRACT Frontier AI labs should not have limited liability for torts. When a company commits a tort it cannot pay for, limited liability caps shareholders’ losses at the value of their shares and lets the rest fall on the public. In effect, this makes limited liability a subsidy for risks borne by others. Scholars have […]
Rachel Leow, ‘Agency in the Law: Definitions, Concepts, and Complications’
ABSTRACT What do we mean when we talk about agency? The answer depends on one’s discipline. Agency has different meanings and normative significance in law, morality, politics, economics, and other disciplines. This chapter was written for a conference on the theory of agency relationships, bringing together lawyers, philosophers, and economists to discuss different perspectives on […]