Shareholder Protection around the World ("Leximetric II")

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder protection has improved in the last years; that developed countries perform better than developing countries in protecting shareholders; that shareholder protection in common law countries is relatively similar whereas there is no comparable similarity within the Ger-man and French civil law families; that German corporate law is "more main-stream" and US corporate law is "more eccentric" than the law of the other countries; and that in general there has been convergence in the last decade. In order to explain these results, the distinction between origin and transplant countries can be useful. However, in contrast to previous studies, this does not mean that all depends on the distinction between English, French and German origin and transplant countries. Rather it is decisive (a) which "version" of the corporate law the transplant country copied, (b) whether transplant countries continue to take developments in the origin countries into account and (c) whether transplant countries have left the path of their (former) origin countries.Shareholder protection, leximetrics, numerical comparative law, law and fi-nance, La Porta et al., LLSV, comparative company law, comparative corporate law, comparative corporate governance, legal origins, legal families, legal transplants, legal development, convergence, civil law, common law.

Shareholder Protection Across Countries – Is the EU on the Right Track?

Anlegerschutz, EU-Recht, EU-Staaten, Investor protection, Community law, EU countries

The End of Comparative Law

Following the 1900 congress in Paris, the beginning of the 20th century saw comparative law emerge as a significant discipline. This paper suggests that the early 21st century is seeing the decline, or maybe even the 'end', of comparative law. In contrast to other claims which see the 21st century as the 'era of comparative law', there are at least four trends which give rise to pessimism: 'the disregard', 'the complexity', 'the simplicity', and 'the irrelevance' of comparative law. These phenomena will be explained in the body of this paper; the concluding part considers suggestions as to how to proceed further.Comparative law, numerical comparative law, legal culture, law and finance, World Bank, harmonisation, convergence, governance.

Legal origins: reconciling law and finance and comparative law

In the last few years law and finance scholars have 'discovered' the usefulness of comparative law. Their studies look at the quantifiable effect that legal rules and their enforcement have on financial development in different countries. Moreover, they link their results with the long- standing distinction between Civil Law and Common Law countries. Whether this revival of 'legal families' is a useful way forward is, however, a matter of debate. The following article challenges these studies and looks for characteristic features which are more precise and meaningful than the use of legal families as such.legal origins, legal families, legal traditions, numerical comparative law, law and finance, law and development, Civil Law, Common Law

Shareholder Protection: A Leximetric Approach

In this paper we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. At-tributing and comparing legal differences by numbers is contrary to the tradi-tional way of doing comparative law and the use of a quantitative methodology to account for variations across legal systems has been subjected to some searching criticisms. However, we believe that with a cautious approach, it has the potential to open new vistas of research in the area of comparative law and as such should not be shunned. This paper provides an illustration of the inter-esting possibilities that diligent quantification of legal rules ('leximetrics') pro-vides for comparing variations across time series and across legal systems. For instance, our study finds, that in all of our panel countries shareholder protec-tion has been improving in the last three decades; that the protection of minority against majority shareholders is considerably stronger in 'blockholder countries' as compared to the non-blockholder countries and that convergence in share-holder protection is taking place since 1993 and is increasing since 2001. Fi-nally, our examination of the legal differences between the five countries does not confirm the distinction between common law and civil law countries.Shareholder protection, leximetrics, numerical comparative law, law and fi-nance, La Porta et al., LLSV, coding, comparative company law, comparative corporate law, comparative corporate governance, legal origins, legal development, convergence

Diversity in Shareholder Protection in Common Law Countries

Aktionär, Anlegerschutz, Common Law, Shareholders, Investor protection

Language, Legal Origins, and Culture before the Courts: Cross-Citations between Supreme Courts in Europe

Should courts consider cases from other jurisdictions? The use of foreign law precedent has sparked considerable debate in the United States, and this question is also controversially discussed in Europe. In this article and within the larger research project from which it has developed, we study the dialogue between different European supreme courts quantitatively. Using legal databases in Austria, Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, we have hand-collected a dataset of transnational citations between the highest courts of these countries for the time between 2000 and 2007. In the present article we show that citation of foreign law by supreme courts is not an isolated phenomenon in Europe, but happens on a regular basis. We found 1,430 instances in which these courts have cited the supreme courts of the other nine countries. The majority of these citations have been made for purely comparative reasons. We also undertook regression analysis in order to understand the differences between the cross-citations. Whether such citations take place and in what quantity depends on the particular legal culture and its relationship to others. Austria and Ireland, which stand in an asymmetric relationship with Germany and England respectively, seem to be particularly receptive to foreign influence on their legal systems. But even controlling for these outliers, we have been able to identify that the population of the cited country and a low level of corruption, native languages and language skills, legal origins and families, and cultural and political factors all matter for which courts are likely to be cited. More specifically, knowledge of the language of the cited court appears to be a more important factor driving cross-citations than legal traditions, culture or politics. Thus, to facilitate a transnational market of legal ideas, it can be suggested that courts should strive to make their decisions available in languages that possible readers understand

Letting Companies Choose Between Board Models: An Empirical Analysis of Country Variations

This article has a dual aim: it aims to contribute to the substance of comparative corporate law and it aims to advance the methodology of comparative legal research. In substantive terms, the article addresses the key question about the design of a suitable board structure. It notes that today many countries not only allow modifications of the default structure, but provide two separate legal templates by giving firms a choice between a one-tier and a two-tier board model. Yet, information on the actual choices made by companies is rare. This article aims to fill this gap. It presents original data about the choice of board models from fourteen European jurisdictions, analyzing variations of popularity of these models at the country level. For this purpose, the article applies the techniques of “correspondence analysis” and “qualitative comparative analysis,” which have been developed by other academic disciplines but have so far been rarely employed in comparative legal scholarship. One of the main advantages of these techniques is that they do not depend on a large number of observations as is the case for econometric methods. They are also intuitive to use for legal scholars as they are not simply based on particular numerical scores (such as significant levels) but ask researchers to use their qualitative skills and knowledge in research design and evaluation. In conclusion, the new data and analyses show that there are profound country differences in the preferred choice for one of the board models and that both path dependence and legal differences can help to explain those variations