Beyond the Anatomy

The final chapter of the ‘Anatomy of Corporate Law’ starts with an assessment of the innovativeness of the functional and comparative approach of the book: First, the approach is wholistic and second it is independent of jurisprudential idiosyncrasies and focuses on substantive results. It thus promises more reliable conclusions than traditional comparative analyses. The ‘Anatomy’s’ most basic finding is that all five benchmark jurisdictions, France, Germany, Japan, the U.S. and the UK – to a surprising degree – pick from among the same handful of legal strategies when addressing a specific agency problem or regulating a particular transaction. The most promising avenues for multi-disciplinary research on corporate law ‘Beyond the Anatomy’ concern the interrelation of corporate law and market institutions, trade-offs in legal strategies, the drivers of regulatory change, regulatory techniques, the functioning of corporate boards, controlling shareholders and groups of companies, interest groups as for example the bar, regulators and administrators, the role of litigation, differences between publicly traded and closely held corporations and finally the extent to which the findings can be used to deal with emerging jurisdictions issues