This insightful Research Handbook contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of corporate purpose and personhood, which has become the central debate of corporate law. It provides cutting-edge thoughts on the role of corporations in society and the nature of their rights and responsibilities.

Understanding the corporation means understanding its legal framework, but until recently the origins and evolution of corporate law have received relatively little attention. The topical chapters featured in this Research Handbook, contributed by leading scholars from around the world, examine the historical development of corporation and business organization law in the Americas, Europe, and Asia from the ancient world to modern times, providing an invaluable resource for both further historical research and scholars seeking the origins of present-day issues.

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.

The Research Handbook on Fiduciary Law offers specially commissioned chapters written by leading scholars and covers a wide range of important topics in fiduciary law. Topical contributions discuss: various fiduciary relationships; the duty of loyalty and other fiduciary obligations; fiduciary remedies; the role of equity; the role of trust; international and comparative perspectives; and public fiduciary law. This Research Handbook will be of interest to readers concerned with both theory and practice, as it incorporates significant new insights and developments in the field.

Shareholder inspection rights form an important tool for shareholder protection. They offer shareholders seeking information private access to specific books and records of the company that are otherwise not publicly available. While there has been a discourse on the topic in some jurisdictions such as Delaware (USA), it has not received scholarly treatment at an international level. This Research Handbook seeks to alter that, and signifies the first endeavor to engage in a comprehensive and comparative analysis of shareholder inspection.

Explores the nature of corporate personhood and how it affects the rights, powers, and influence of corporations in society.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has made tremendous advances in the last two decades, but as smart as AI is now, it is getting smarter and becoming more autonomous. This raises a host of challenges to current legal doctrine, including whether AI/algorithms should count as ‘speech’, whether AI should be regulated under antitrust and criminal law statutes, and whether AI should be considered as an agent under agency law or be held responsible for injuries under tort law. This book contains chapters from US and international law scholars on the role of law in an age of increasingly smart AI, addressing these and other issues that are critical to the evolution of the field.