A New Look at Comparative Corporate Law

COMPARATIVE CORPORATE LAW, RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY MARCO VENTORUZZO, MARIO NOTARI AND COAUTHORS, MERGES JUDICIAL CASES AND STATUTORY MATERIALS FROM MANY DIFFERENT LEGAL SYSTEMS

“What is fascinating about comparative analysis is that by contrasting cases that belong to different jurisdictions and decades it reveals often unexpected correlations and debunks myths and stereotypes”, explains Marco Ventoruzzo, full professor at the Department of Law at Bocconi and at Pennsylvania State University – Dickinson School of Law. Together with Mario Notari, full professor of corporate law at Bocconi, and other coauthors, Ventoruzzo coordinated and contributed to the new, extensive book Comparative Corporate Law.
 
Published with West Academic Press, one of the leading American law book providers, the work analyses judicial cases from the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Japan, alongside references to other countries like Israel, China and Russia. “Almost all the cases were translated from scratch from the original language. The result was remarkable also from the terminological point of view”, Ventoruzzo underlined. Comparative Corporate Law combines the typically Anglo-Saxon approach, centered on cases, with a more explanative methodology, with expanded descriptive sections, thus emerging as an innovative learning tool.
 
Greeted with interest by the academic world and legal practitioners, the book discusses topics such as regulatory competition; the incorporation process; corporate finance and governance; shareholders’ agreements; mergers and acquisitions; public offers and takeovers; international litigation and arbitration. An excerpt of the book including the table of contents and the premises can be read at this link.
 
Although its purpose is mainly didactic, Comparative Corporate Law also aims at generating questions and suggesting research hints to the readers, “especially when cases that can be assimilated are treated analogously, in spite of belonging to different legal systems and ages. Think about the Holzmüller, Gelatine and Blasius cases concerning directors’ liability and shareholder derivative suits, or how insider trading is regulated in different areas of the world, sometimes according to strict and rigorous rules, as is the case with Europe and Brazil, sometimes according to blurry standards, like the concept of fiduciary duties in the US”, Ventoruzzo concludes.
 
The authors donated all royalties from the book to the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit US organization that provides free legal representation to the underprivileged and to minorities who were victims of judicial errors or sentenced to death.

by Elisa Bazzani