Date: October 23, 2025
Type: Seminar
This event is co-organized with the Asian Institute of International Financial Law (AIIFL) of The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
Speaker: Eva Micheler (Professor of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Traditional corporate law focuses too narrowly on agency theory and conflicts of interest. This reliance on agency-theoretic reasoning has led to substantial theoretical and empirical advances in company law scholarship, but the narrow focus on board-level actors and phenomena has disconnected the analysis of the company from the reality of the economic organisation it is meant to enable and support. We follow Oliver Williamson’s call for a ‘law, economics, and organization’ approach, and build on Elinor Ostrom’s ‘institutional analysis and development’ framework to propose a narrative model of the company in terms of nested levels of governance. We argue that our model works as a positive description of the law as it is, and puts us in a stronger position to evaluate the likely consequences of certain normative interventions, which we illustrate with some observations about ongoing debates in corporate governance.
Eva Micheler is a full professor at the Law School of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She researches corporate and corporate finance law with a particular focus on corporate law & theory and securities & the digitisation of assets. Her academic work was cited by the UK Supreme Court, the Australian High Court, and the Austrian Supreme Court.
