The End of History for Corporate Law

TLDR: The basic law of corporate governance has achieved a high degree of uniformity across developed market jurisdictions, and continuing convergence toward a single, standard model is likely as discussed by the authors, which 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.

Abstract: 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 in the late nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are witnessing rapid convergence on the standard shareholder-oriented model as a normative view of corporate structure and governance.