This book identifies and examines the legal challenges facing the shipping industry and ship management today. It first addresses flag state rules and private international law as organisational tools of the shipowner for establishing the applicable legal framework in an age of increasing regulatory activity and extraterritorial effect of legislation. It then focuses on sustainability requirements and the liability of shipping companies managing supply chains and ships as waste. The third section considers challenges stemming from times of financial crisis and deals with the cross-border impact of shipping insolvencies, the UNCITRAL Model Law, and the approaches of different jurisdictions. Finally, the fourth section concerns digitalisation and automation, including delivery on the basis of digital release codes, bills of lading based on blockchain technology, the use of web portals and data sharing, and particular aspects of the law relating to autonomous ships, notably in marine insurance and carriage of goods. The book will be a useful resource for academics and practising lawyers working in shipping and maritime law.

Colonial Adventures: Commercial Law and Practice in the Making addresses the question how and to what extend the development of commercial law and practice, from Ancient Greece to the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were indebted to colonial expansion and maritime trade. Illustrated by experiences in Ancient Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, the book examines how colonial powers, whether consciously or not, reshaped the law in order to foster the prosperity of homeland manufacturers and entrepreneurs or how local authorities and settlers brought the transplanted law in line with the colonial objectives and the local constraints amid shifting economic, commercial and political realities. Contributors are: Alain Clement (), Alexander Claver, Oscar Cruz-Barney, Bas De Roo, Paul du Plessis, Bernard Durand, David Gilles, Petra Mahy, David Mirhady, M. C. Mirow, Luigi Nuzzo, Phillip Lipton, Umakanth Varottil, and Jakob Zollmann.

This book focuses on the building of a crypto economy as an alternative economic space and discusses how the crypto economy should be governed. The crypto economy is examined in its productive and financialised aspects, in order to distil the need for governance in this economic space. The author argues that it is imperative for regulatory policy to develop the economic governance of the blockchain-based business model, in order to facilitate economic mobilisation and wealth creation. The regulatory framework should cater for a new and unique enterprise organisational law and the fund-raising and financing of blockchain-based development projects. Such a regulatory framework is crucially enabling in nature and consistent with the tenets of regulatory capitalism. Further, the book acknowledges the rising importance of private monetary orders in the crypto economy and native payment systems that do not rely on conventional institutions for value transfer. A regulatory blueprint is proposed for governing such monetary orders as 'commons' governance. The rise of Decentralised Finance and other financial innovations in the crypto economy are also discussed, and the book suggests a framework for regulatory consideration in this dynamic landscape in order to meet a balance of public interest objectives and private interests. By setting out a reform agenda in relation to economic and financial governance in the crypto economy, this forward-looking work argues for the extension of 'regulatory capitalism' to this perceived 'wild west' of an alternative economic space. It advances the message that an innovative regulatory agenda is needed to account for the economically disruptive and technologically transformative developments brought about by the crypto economy.

China's foreign investment legal regime encompasses domestic laws governing inward and outward investments, investment treaties and the Belt and Road Initiative. Can China's foreign investment legal regime lead its two-way investments towards the country's five development goals (building technological capacity, deepening integration into the global economy, promoting green development, protecting security, and participating in global economic governance and rule-making)? Yawen Zheng pioneers a systematic study of China's foreign investment legal regime, finding that the regime has gradually made progress towards the development goals, but the effort is diluted by obstacles such as outdated treaties, conflicts with the West, and domestic political challenges.

This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive account of the "juridiction consulaire," ""or Merchant Court, of eighteenth-century Paris. Drawing on extensive archival research, Amalia D. Kessler reconstructs the workings of the court and the commercial law that it applied and uses these to shed new light on questions about the relationship between commerce and modernity that are of deep and abiding interest to lawyers, historians, and social scientists alike. Kessler shows how the merchants who were associated with the court--and not just elite thinkers and royal reformers--played a key role in reconceptualizing commerce as the credit-fueled private exchange necessary to sustain the social order. Deploying this modern conception of commerce in a variety of contexts, ranging from litigation over negotiable instruments to corporatist battles for status and jurisdiction, these merchants contributed (largely inadvertently and to their ultimate regret) to the demise of corporatism as both conceptual framework and institutional practice. In so doing, they helped bring about the social and political revolution of 1789. Highly readable and engaging, "A Revolution in Commerce" provides important new insights into the rise of commercial modernity by demonstrating the remarkable role played by the law in ideological and institutional transformation.

Biotechnology has prompted a revolution in science and society in the truest sense of the word. For what superficially appears to be a revolution in biotechnology, in effect touches upon the fundamentals of life and the way in which humans relate to it. This book will make a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the effective regulation of biotechnology. The contributing authors assess how regulatory regimes can accommodate the many different and often conflicting issues to which biotechnology is giving rise to (including a very tainted public image). The book's ultimate aim is to explore ways of designing a regulatory regime that takes heed of these different demands whilst, at the same time, answering to the imperatives of effectiveness and efficiency. The book synthesizes three fields of legal analysis; the first focuses on the risk-dominated regulation of GM food and bio-agriculture; the second involves human genetics as a field dominated by considerations of ethics. Finally, patent law has been chosen as an area captured by notions of property. With its holistic approach, The Regulatory Challenge of Biotechnology will be of great interest to academics, policymakers and regulators as well as biotechnology and law students.

This book analyses actual and potential normative (whether legislative or contractual) conflicts and complex transnational disputes related to state-controlled enterprises (SCEs) operations and how they are interwoven with the problem of foreign direct investment. Moreover, SCEs also fall within the remit of international political economy, international economics and other SCE-related fields that go beyond purely legal or regulatory matters. In this connection, research on such economic and political determinants of SCE's operations greatly informs and supplements the state of knowledge on how to best regulate cross-border aspects of SCE's and is also be covered in this book. The book also aims to analyse the "SCE phenomenon" which includes a wide panoply of entities that have various structures with different degrees of control by states at the central or regional level, and that critically discuss the above-mentioned overlapping legal economic and political systems which can emerge under various shades of shadows casted by governmental umbrellas (i.e., the control can be exercised through ownership, right to appoint the management, and special-voting-rights). The chapters in this book are grouped, so as to address cross-border investment by and in SCE, into four coherent major parts, namely --- (i) the regulatory framework of state capitalism: laws, treaties, and contracts; (ii) economic and institutional expansion of state capitalism; (iii) the accountability of state capitalism: exploring the forms of liabilities; and (iv) regional and country perspectives. Contributions address the core theme from a broad range of SCE and international economic regulations, including but not limited to competition law, WTO law, investment law, and financial/monetary law. They also cover the new emerging generation of Free Trade Agreements (EU-Vietnam FTA, EU China investment treaty, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership; and the coordination between treaty systems). The book is a valuable addition and companion for courses, such as international trade law, international law of foreign investment, transnational law, international and economic development, world politics, law of preferential trade agreements, international economics, and economics of development.

Vessels very frequently serve under a long chain of charterparties and sub-charterparties. When this is the case, the legal issues are more convoluted than they might at first seem. Incorporation clauses are commonplace in bills of lading used in the tramp trade due to the desire to make this web of contracts back-to-back. The extent to which the terms of the charterparty referred to can be carried across to the bill of lading has, over the centuries, been hotly disputed in many jurisdictions. Entirely dedicated to the topic of the incorporation of charterparty terms into bills of lading, this book discusses and analyses the legal and practical issues surrounding this topic under English and US law. Through discussions on the incorporation of a wide range of different charterparty terms, the book combines the peculiar and sophisticated rules of incorporation with the legal and practical issues concerning shipping, international trade, arbitration and conflict of laws and jurisdiction.

The law of secured transactions has seen dramatic changes in the last decade. International organisations, particularly the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), have been working towards the creation of international legal standards aimed at the modernisation and harmonisation of secured financing laws (eg, the United Nations Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade, the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions and its Intellectual Property Supplement, the UNCITRAL Guide on the Implementation of a Security Rights Registry and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions). The overall theme of this book is international (or cross-border) secured transactions law. It assembles contributions from some of the most authoritative academic voices on secured financing law. This publication will be of interest to those involved in secured transactions around the world, including policy-makers, practitioners, judges, arbitrators and academics.

This edition of the Comparative Law Yearbook of International Business provides ageneral examination of issues vital to the world's economic recovery. In the field ofcompany law, practitioners examine changes in Russia's corporate law and the newUkrainian law governing joint-stock companies. In the area of competition law, lawyersreview Serbia's and Bulgaria's new laws on the protection of competition and theprivate enforcement of Articles 101 and 102 in Europe's national courts.Dispute resolution occupies two chapters, one dealing with best practices for draftingarbitration clauses and the other set aside, recognition, and enforcement of privatecommercial arbitration awards. A further two chapters treat employment and labormatters relating to distribution and commercial representation, indemnity upontermination, and processing personal data in the employment context in Hungary. Inthe area of financial services, practitioners from five jurisdictions deal with fiduciaryduty, the European Commission's proposed Directive on Alternative InvestmentFund Managers, Swiss disclosure rules on significant shareholdings, restructuringand refinancing routes for mortgage-secured debt in Spain, and insurance laws andregulations in Nigeria. Foreign investment is examined by two authors, reporting on2008 and 2009 developments in investment treaty disputes and foreign investmentin Indonesia. Intellectual property issues are reviewed in chapters relating to the useof intellectual property as collateral in secured financing and intellectual propertylicensing in Canada. Finally, lawyers treaty a variety of other issues, including the taxlaw of Liechtenstein, European Union-Israel trade in the automobile sector, insolvencyrisk and creditors' rights in Peru, the modernizing of trust law in Hong Kong andbridging cultural differences in international transactions.

Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state, with more than 18,000 islands and over 7.9 million square kilometres of sea. The marine frontier presents the nation with both economic opportunities and political and strategic challenges. Indonesia has been affected more than most countries in the world by a slow revolution in the management of its waters. Whereas Indonesia's seas were once conceived administratively as little more than the empty space between islands, successive governments have become aware that this view is outmoded. The effective transfer to the seas of regulatory regimes that took shape on land, such as territoriality, has been an enduring challenge to Indonesian governments. This book addresses issues related to maritime boundaries and security, marine safety, inter-island shipping, the development of the archipelagic concept in international law, marine conservation, illegal fishing, and the place of the sea in national and regional identity.

When courts 'pierce the corporate veil', they disregard the separateness of the corporation and hold a shareholder responsible for the corporation's action as if it were the shareholder's own. Although as a general rule the courts are reluctant to allow corporate veil piercing, creditors of an insolvent corporation frequently attempt to hold the shareholders liable when they cannot obtain satisfaction from their debtor. In the United States, in fact, piercing claims constitute the single most litigated area in corporate law.This study clears up some of the mists hanging around the concept of corporate veil piercing. What exactly is corporate veil piercing and in which situations does it occur? What are the legal rules involved? Following a short overview of the applicable law in the six legal systems that are the subject of this study-those of Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States-the author proceeds with a more profound analysis from a functional comparative perspective, starting from particular situations that typically call for shareholder liability for the debts of subsidiary companies.Among the grounds for veil piercing claims the author discusses the following, along with the substantive and procedural law and important cases associated with each in the six jurisdictions covered: undercapitalization; asset stripping; undue continuing of loss-making activities; and dentification or the consideration of the corporate group as an economic unit. In the course of the presentation, a thorough analysis of legal scholarship in the area leads to numerous applications of the various theories and doctrines that can be brought to bear on veil piercing cases. In addition, an in-depth discussion of the international dimension of corporate veil piercing focuses on the question of which laws should govern the liability of a parent corporation for the debts of its subsidiary. Throughout, the author's clear insight into the substantive law of veil piercing sheds light on traditional misconceptions in the conflict of laws on the issue.She also details initiatives undertaken by various international bodies, including the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Union, the International Court of Justice, and the International Labour Organization.Dr Vandekerckhove's study is the most comprehensive, far-reaching, and up-to-date study of this important growing area of corporate law practice. As such it will prove of great value to practitioners, judges, and academics in the field, and will prove its worth anywhere in the world where the presence of multinational corporations is felt.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of Chinese legal and regulatory systems governing international trade, following China's accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in November 2001, and the coming into force of the revised PRC Foreign Trade Law in July 2004. It provides a systematic and in-depth analysis on the text of applicable Chinese laws and rules, with a particular focus on their practical application. It also critically explores whether international trade regulation in China complies with the WTO Agreement both in the text and in spirit and identifies areas where improvements by Chinese trade regulators would be desirable. This book starts with an analysis of basic issues of international trade regulation in China. Part II, covers foreign trading rights, trade restrictions and prohibitions, licensing and quotas, customs regulation, health, safety and technical standards, and trade in technology. The focus is on possible abuses of trade regulations designed to be neutral but which have the effect of discriminating against goods of foreign origin. law, in the form of anti-dumping law, anti-subsidy law, safeguarding measures and trade retaliation. Part IV explores new regulatory issues, including trade promotion, trade and competition, trade and IP rights protection, and resolution of trade disputes. This book combines academic research with detailed information and practical advice on the laws and policies of international trade regulation in China. It should attract not only legal researchers, but also practitioners who have an interest in international trade with China and the relevant legal and regulatory issues.