This book sets out a new approach to identifying and resolving corporate law's normative concerns, establishing new methodology through detailed analysis of key changes in market practice. Paterson adopts a comparative UK/US approach in analysing the process of institutional change, providing important lessons for global legal harmonisation.

This book is the first to examine intermediaries in a holistic and systematic manner. The classical model of face-to-face contracting between two individuals is no longer dominant. Instead, deals frequently involve a number of parties, often acting through intermediaries. As a result, it is important to understand the role and power of intermediaries. Intermediaries tend to be considered within discrete silos of the law. But by focussing upon a particular, narrow area of law, lessons are not learned from analogous situations. This book takes a broader approach, and looks across the traditional boundaries of private law in order to gain a proper assessment of the role played by intermediaries. A wide range of jurisdictions and topical issues are discussed in order to illuminate the role intermediaries play in commercial law. For example, the continued growth of electronic commerce requires consideration of the role of websites and other platforms as intermediaries. And developments in artificial intelligence raise the prospect of intermediaries being non-human actors. All these issues are subject to rigorous analysis by the expert contributors to this book.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of 4 economically significant Asian jurisdictions: Mainland China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore. These jurisdictions have recently either reformed – or are considering reforming – their corporate restructuring laws to promote regimes conducive to restructuring financially distressed, but otherwise economically viable, companies. Mainland China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore continue to adhere to a framework that requires the court's final approval but draw references from Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code 1978 in the United States and/or the schemes of arrangement in the United Kingdom. However, the institutional and market structures are very different in Asia; in particular, Asia has a far higher concentration in shareholdings among listed firms, including holdings by families and the state, and a different composition of creditors. The book explains how, notwithstanding the legal transplantation, corporate restructuring laws in these Asian jurisdictions have adapted and evolved due to the frictions in shareholder-creditor and creditor-creditor relationships, and the role of the state in resolving non-performing loans and financial distress of state-owned enterprises which are listed, or which issue public debt. The study argues that any reforms must go beyond professionalising the insolvency professionals and the judiciary but must be designed to address fundamental issues of corporate governance, bank regulation and enforcing non-bankruptcy rules. It offers invaluable insights for academics and policy makers alike.

This timely Research Handbook examines the increasingly economically vital topic of corporate restructuring. Reflecting a shift in the global approach to insolvency towards a focus on rescuing viable businesses rather than liquidation, chapters consider all areas of the law closely connected to corporate insolvency, rehabilitation and rescue, as well as the introduction of the EU Preventive Restructuring Directive and other reforms from around the world.

Corporate Reorganisation Law argues that corporate reorganisation law is seen by market participants as a tool they can mobilise and adapt according to practices, logics, and identities in the of the financial and non-financial corporate markets. Thus changes in market practice, in the participants in the process, or in how the participants view their objectives, can significantly change the ways in which corporate reorganisation law is mobilised and adapted, even if the law has not undergone any reform. This book argues that corporate reorganisation law cannot be evaluated using a theoretical model in isolation from the wider institutional context in which corporate reorganisation law is mobilised and adapted by the participants to the process. In establishing the new methodology, the book undertakes a detailed analysis of six key changes in market practice, logic and identities in the financial and non-financial corporate fields. A comparative US/UK approach is adopted in analysing both the process of institutional change and the implications for law. This provides a fascinating lens through which to see how different institutional environments in the financial and non-financial markets in different jurisdictions are drawing together, and interacting with very different legal systems which were adapted to the distinct, original institutional environments in which they were developed. From this analysis important lessons for legal harmonisation efforts in Europe and in non-European jurisdictions are drawn out. The work emphasises the need to look at formal legal rules in combination with other, non-legal and legal institutions and argues that current reform debates in both the US and UK have suffered because scholars, practitioners, and policy makers have not started their evaluation of the case for reform by placing corporate reorganisation law in this wider institutional context. The book aims to fill this gap, and to provide a methodological approach for the future.

As market competition replaces state regulation in many economic fields, competition policy has become an area of increasing significance. Against this background, Suzuki highlights the importance of the domestic political structure for competition policy. He does this through the comparative analysis of competition law reforms in Britain and Japan. He argues - controversially - that a country's domestic political structure should be considered a major factor in causing the reform of competition law, and rejects the established view that it is necessarily a result of changes in international economic and political conditions.

This book examines how businesses manage their labour systems, and particularly how they manage the complex interaction of factors which give rise to instances of 'partnership' style relations between businesses and their employees. The book draws from the literature concerning 'Varieties of Capitalism' (VoC) and the different institutional and regulatory designs inherent in different types of political economy. The book is informed by a new and extensive set of empirical data from Australia that examines the activities of national and multinational business corporations, their outlooks and relationships with stakeholders, and relates these to new and evolving theoretical frameworks based in political economy and law. The book places the Australian regulatory model within this international debate, and assesses the extent to which the system does or does not fit into the general categorisation created in the VoC literature.