The End of History for Corporate Law

The basic law of corporate governance—indeed, most of corporate law—has achieved a high degree of uniformity across developed market jurisdictions, and continuing convergence toward a single, standard model is likely. It is sometimes said that the shareholder-oriented model of corporate law is well suited only to those jurisdictions in which one finds large numbers of firms with widely dispersed share ownership, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The core legal features of the corporate form were already well established in advanced jurisdictions one hundred years ago, at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, just as there was rapid crystallization of the core features of the corporate form…