The changing landscape of corporate law
The changing landscape of corporate law
The changing landscape of corporate law will be examined by eminent international and local presenters at a one-day conference in Auckland to mark 20 years of the Companies Act 1993.
The timely event will look at the impact of those legislative innovations on the practice of corporate law, and also look forward to see how our company law might adapt and develop in a fast changing world.
Conference speakers will question whether this law has adapted sufficiently to current business conditions, and make suggestions for change.
The event, supported by the Legal Research Foundation, University of Auckland Law School and the Law Foundation, will also mark Professor John Farrar’s career in New Zealand, Australian and UK company law, where he has been an influential figure since the 1970s.
The conference will be held at the Pullman Hotel on August 7, starting with breakfast at 7.45am.
The keynote speaker is Professor Joe McCahery, a Professor of International Economic Law at Tilburg University, where he is also a Fellow of the Tilburg University Law and Economics Centre and the European Banking Centre. He is programme director of the MSc and LLM in Finance and Law at Duisenberg School of Finance in Amsterdam.
The Companies Act 1993 was a watershed piece of legislation. It marked a turning away from an approach to corporate law where New Zealand essentially adopted UK legislation, to the adoption of legislation that had its foundations in North American legislation but with its own idiosyncratic New Zealand flavour.
Many parts of the legislation were ground breaking with the codification of directors’ duties and the statutory derivative action legislative innovations that have ironically been followed in the UK 2006 Companies Act (although the UK legislators may not view their adoption in quite that way.)
Eminent international and New Zealand conference speakers will question whether the law that governs the primary vehicle of business enterprise has adapted sufficiently to the Twenty-first Century business landscape and make suggestions for changes where it has not. The speakers will draw on international legislative developments and thinking and apply it to New Zealand company law and practice.
The conference will be relevant to New Zealand practitioners and academics. The distinguished panel of international speakers will set out international developments and the New Zealand speakers will discuss the impact of those international developments on the New Zealand corporate law landscape.
This will allow conference participants and the audience to reflect on how the practice of corporate law practice may change in light of international developments (both because it needs to change and because it would be desirable that it change) and also make concrete recommendations about possible legislative changes.
The intention after the conference is to publish the conference proceedings as an edited collection.
For speaker biographies, enrolments and more information, please visit: www.legalresearch.org.nz/events/2014/08/07/the-changing-landscape-of-corporate-law.aspx
ENDS