The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance

Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field.

Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finances that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation.

Now in paperback, the Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.

Jeffrey N. Gordon, Richard Paul Richman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School,Wolf-Georg Ringe, Professor of International Commercial Law, Copenhagen Business School and the University of Oxford

Jeffrey Gordon is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Richman Center for Business, Law & Public Policy at Columbia Law School. He is also the Co-Director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, and the Co-Director for the Center for Law and Economic Studies. His main areas of interest are in corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, comparative corporate governance, and the regulation of financial institutions.


Wolf-Georg Ringe is a Professor of International Commercial Law at Copenhagen Business School. He also teaches on the faculty of law at the University of Oxford and is a research fellow at the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law and an associate member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He is the general editor of the new Journal of Financial Regulation, published by Oxford University Press since 2015. Georg Ringe teaches various courses in the field of corporate and business law, and his current research interests are in the general area of law and finance, comparative corporate governance, capital and financial markets, insolvency law, and conflict of laws.

Part l: Theoretical Approaches, Tools, and Methods
1. Theories of Corporate Law, Ronald Gilson
2. Regulatory Competition, Marcel Kahan
3. Corporate Law and Politics, Mark J. Roe
4. Contractual Theory, Michael Klausner
5. Law and Culture, Amir Licht
6. Convergence and Persistence in Corporate Law, Jeffrey N. Gordon and Mark Roe
7. Corporate Governance in Financial Institutions, Jeffrey N. Gordon
8. Accounting and Reporting, Lawrence A. Cunningham
9. Economic Tools in Corporate Law, Allen Ferrell
10. Behavioural Perspectives, Jaap Winter
11. Taxonomies and Leximetric Approaches, Mathias Siems
Part II: Substantive Topics
12. Separate Legal Personality / Asset Partitioning, Richard Squire and Henry Hansmann
13. Limited Liability, Eric Talley
14. Board of Directors, Stephen Bainbridge
15. Executive Compensation, Guido Ferrarini and Cristina Ungureanu
16. Shareholder Rights, Robert M. Daines
17. Institutional Investors, Edward B. Rock
18. Activist Shareholders, Georg Ringe
19. Short-termism, Mark J. Roe
20. Minority Protection, Zohar Goshen and Assaf Hamdani
21. Creditors in Corporate Law, Charles Whitehead
22. Related Party Transactions, Luca Enriques
23. Takeovers and Control Transactions, Paul Davies
24. Restructurings and Mergers and Acquisitions, John C. Coates
25. Groups of Companies, Klaus J. Hopt
26. Governance of Private Firms, Holger Fleischer
27. Corporate Social Responsibility, Cynthia Williams
Part III: New Challenges in Corporate Governance
28. Western versus Asian Corporate Governance Environments, Hideki Kanda
29. Corporate Governance in Emerging Markets, Mariana Pargendler
30. Chinese Corporate Governance, Curtis J. Milhaupt
31. The Rise of Foreign Ownership, Merritt Fox
32. Institutional Investors, Intermediation, and Internal Governance, Gerard Hertig
33. Market Integration and Globalization, Erik Vermeulen
34. Extraterritorial Application, Jack Coffee
Part IV: Enforcement
35. Self-Regulation in Corporate Law, David Kershaw
36. Private Enforcement, Randall Thomas and James D. Cox
37. Public Enforcement (Public versus Private Enforcement), Howell E. Jackson and Jeffrey Y. Zhang
38. Public Enforcement (Criminal versus Civil Santions), Amanda Rose
39. Specialised Company Courts + Delaware, Joseph A. McCahery
40. Compliance in Corporate Law, Geoffrey Miller
Part V: Adjacent Areas
41. Corporate Finance, Robert Jackson
42. Insolvency Law, Horst Eidenmuller
43. Contract Law, Robert E. Scott
44. Employment Law and Industrial Relations, Simon F. Deakin
45. Capital Markets / Securities Law, Adam Pritchard
46. Financial Regulation, Jonathan R. Macey
47. Taxation Law, David M. Schizer