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This paper argues that Charles Reznikoff’s autobiography, Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America, presents Jewish law as an ethical alternative to U.S. law. The autobiography illustrates how Jewish law refuses to let social and economic hierarchies compromise its emphasis on truth-finding and the speedy resolution of legal troubles. Family Chronicle tragically portrays the Reznikoff family’s inability to exert equal bargaining power with its landlords, something commercial lease law assumes they can do. Reznikoff’s autobiography suggests that the United States can better realize its democratic principles by revising commercial lease law to reflect the tenant-centered approach of residential lease law.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the legislation mandating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) principles is more effective than regulatory encouragement and voluntary company compliance in Kuwaiti Companies Law. Doctrinal legal research was used to analyse CSR provisions through a legal lens by comparing existing CSR provisions of UK and Indian Companies Law in order to determine a middle-ground approach for Kuwaiti Companies Law, since this research deduced that no such provisions exist in Kuwait. By comparing the Companies Laws of UK, India and Kuwait, a number of CSR provisional areas were explored, such as socioeconomic issues, governance structures, corporate constituencies, directors’ duties, corporate objectives and reporting. The findings show that Kuwait could adopt the models applied to both UK and India, but would gear more towards the Indian model since both countries share similar principles or views on CSR-related issues such as corporate philanthropy, as well as mandatory or prescriptive nature of their respected companies law. Although a potential middle-ground can be established for Kuwait’s legal vision, limitations such as the country’s strict culture and religion could potentially impede the provisions proposed in this thesis. Unless Kuwait changes its stance on cultural and religious issues, such as the gender divide and inequality, the proposed CSR provisions that relate to the religious and cultural norms in Kuwait may not make it into a future Companies Law. This research provides an original outlook on analysing and comparing existing CSR provisions in Companies Law across several contexts and recommends novel CSR provisions for countries that have yet to incorporate CSR provisions in their respective Companies Law.

Since the 1990s, the French government has offered tax exemptions for people who buy property and rent it out for at least nine years. This legal framework, centered on incentives, can be considered a new kind of (de)regulation of housing policy, triggering a multiplication of private intermediaries devoted to finding clients for tax exemptions. Based on interviews with 28 investors who feel they have been abused (many of them have started legal proceedings against professionals from whom they bought a property), this study provides a new entry for analyzing legal intermediation, showing that it does not affect all laypeople in the same way, especially when looking at the latter’s social and economic resources. We analyze how and with what devices professionals, whose commercial practices are not fully regulated by law, rely on the law for the success of their transactions, especially with taxpayers who have money to become investors but who are not rich enough to pay for the services of a tax professional. We argue that the ability to resist the appeal of putting money into investments that turned out risky depends on investors’ social and economic resources. Finally, we analyze how the process of legal intermediation described in this chapter impacts investors’ legal consciousness and creates distrust toward the law.

For approximately a century and a half after their dramatic deflation, the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles of 1710–1720 had discredited finance. With the exception of government bond markets and a few chartered companies, the rapid rise and fall of fortunes associated with the South Sea Company, in Britain, and the Mississippi Company in France, had made the joint stock system of corporate finance almost synonymous with fraud and financial debauchery. (The most authoritative account of these schemes is given in Murphy, 1997.) The joint stock system of finance was seen as seriously flawed, and an indictment of the theories on credit money of the schemes’ instigator, John Law. During those one hundred and fifty years, classical political economy rose and flowered. Not surprisingly finance then came to be considered for its fiscal and monetary consequences. This pre-occupation left its mark on twentieth-century economics in an attitude that the fiscal and monetary implications of finance, eventually its influence on consumption, are more important than its balance sheet effects in the corporate sector. This attitude is apparent even in the work of perhaps the pre-eminent twentieth century critical finance theorist, John Maynard Keynes.

In this paper, we analyse how the national variety in professional organisation is affected by the current period of globalisation by reference to key features of the business law firm in the US, the UK and Germany. Our argument is that changes in law firms from these different countries are indeed intertwined with each other through a gradual process of legal globalisation but that they are not necessarily converging on a dominant US model. Rather we find evidence that new hybrid types of firms are arising in Europe out of a re-combination of elements of different national models.

In this paper, we explore an extensive panel data set covering more than 4,000 listed firms in 16 European countries to study the effects of shareholder protection on ownership structure and firm performance. We document a negative firm-level correlation between shareholder protection and ownership concentration. Differentiating between shareholder types, we find that this pattern is mainly driven by strategic investors. In contrast, we find a positive correlation between shareholder protection and block ownership of institutional investors, in particular when we restrict the analysis to independent institutional investors. Finally, we find that independent institutional investors are positively associated with firm valuation as measured by Tobin’s Q. The opposite applies for strategic investors. Overall, our results are consistent with the view that (i) high shareholder protection and (ii) limited ownership by strategic investors make small investors and investors interested in security returns more confident in their investments.

X = multiple interpretations

Purpose – This study examines country-level attributes that impact on Corporate Governance Disclosure (CGD) depending on the emerging market country's legal system.

Methodology/approach – We evaluate CGD level using 749 annual reports (year ended 2006) in 57 emerging market countries. We develop a CGD determinants model that compares differences in country level attributes between common law and civil law emerging market countries. Our model builds on a multiple regression and assumes interaction between the origin of the legal system and country-specific attributes.

Findings – Common law emerging markets have substantially higher levels of CGD than civil law ones. CGD is positively associated with the size of the capital market for the entire sample of emerging markets and for the sub-samples of common law and civil law countries. Law enforcement also has a strong positive influence on CGD in common law emerging countries, whereas it has no influence on CGD in civil law emerging countries.

Practical implications – Providing CGD levels for emerging markets helps to a better understanding of the corporate governance characteristics that prevail in each country. Decision makers (international investors, market authorities, standard setters, etc.) should be aware of how country level attributes may interact with the legal system (common law or civil law) to influence CGD.

Originality of the paper – This is one of the few papers to present evidence of the impact of country level attributes on CGD. This study contributes to identifying the attributes that influence CGD with reference to common law and civil law emerging markets.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained great attention among regulators, stock market authorities, and firms' stakeholders for many decades. In this chapter, we first review the main regulations, standards, and laws issued by UAE federal authorities namely the Company Commercial Law of 2015, the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange (ADX) disclosure guidance of 2019, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, and UAE CSR platform. Second, we present a summary of the empirical research on CSR issues in UAE context, namely in the following four fields: (1) CSR determinants both at the micro and macro levels, (2) CSR measures in the three pillars (environmental, social, and governance), (3) the impact of CSR policy and practices on financial performance/market value, (4) and the role of some mediating/moderating variables such as leadership and board gender diversity. Results show greater compliance to CSR standards among different industries and institutions but heterogenous empirical findings in the four explored fields. While there is crucial alignment with both social and environmental standards as evidenced by numerous empirical studies, additional efforts should be deployed to highlight the governance pillar through firms' discretionary reporting. Our survey provides useful directives and outcomes as it portrays both legal aspects coupled with some empirical evidence of CSR issues in the UAE context. Our study helps corporations to comply with local standards on sustainability reporting and highlights the potential economic benefits and advantages for firms adopting CSR strategy. Furthermore, it can be considered as the cornerstone for regulatory bodies in the United Arab Emirates when issuing/enhancing new standards/rules on CSR practices.

Just as the films that we see are conceived in specific economic, political and cultural contexts, so scholarship is produced within determined situations. This chapter notes some of the driving forces which have led to the emergence of law and film as an area of extensive and very diverse scholarship in the past decade. Whilst these factors have shaped the nature and extent of this work it should be noted that changes in both legal professional interests, academic criteria and within the culture industry mean that we can expect shifts in the nature and patterns of scholarship in the future. These may not, however, be the ones called for by other commentators (Moran, Sandon, Loizidou, & Christie, 2004; Sarat, Douglas, & Umphrey, 2005).