Paddy Ireland

University of Bristol | UB · School of Law

There has long been a tendency to see the corporate legal form as presently constituted as economically determined, as the more or less inevitable product of the demands of advanced technology and economic efficiency. Through an examination of its historical emergence, focusing in particular on the introduction of general limited liability and the...

Britain, for example, seemingly abstract questions about the nature and character of companies

This paper argues that corporate governance, and Anglo-American corporate governance in particular, is in need of radical rather than ameliorative reform. Among the things that the current economic and financial crisis has highlighted is the deeply dysfunctional nature of the highly financialized corporate culture and system of governance that has...

In recent years, the rather arcane subject of corporate governance, meaning the governance of the public companies that dominate the economy, 1 has risen high on the political and legal agenda. Various reasons for this can be identified, prominent amongst them the debates, with which the governance issue has become entwined, about the virtues in re...

Standard company law treatises tend to depict company law as being about the legal aspects of forming and running a business and, therefore, as being about entrepreneurship and enterprise. This article suggests that this conceals as much as it reveals about company law and its significance in contemporary capitalism. Using as a starting point L C B...

Numerous scandals have shown that the UK has an ineffective regulatory architecture populated by overlapping, uncoordinated and unaccountable bodies. This has resulted in duplication, waste and obfuscation as matters get shunted around from regulator to another. The UK has 41 regulators for the financial sector alone and at least 14 dealing with ac...

The UK auditing industry is dysfunctional and in disarray. It is dominated by the big four accounting firms and there is little choice and competition at the top-end of the market. The industry is routinely mired in scandals and audit quality is low. Auditors lack independence, enjoy too many liability concessions and have weak and ineffective regu...

This policy paper was submitted to the UK Labour Party and puts forward proposals to check soarway executive pay and secure a more equitable distribution of income. It contains twenty proposals for empowerment of employees and consumers, greater public information and mechanisms that have teeth.

This review was commissioned by the Shadow Business Secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell.

This paper was written for a journal special issue in which the contributors were asked to address the question: ‘What would an acceptable capitalism look like?’ In 1973, the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, used the phrase ‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’ to condemn the unethical practices of a company called Lonr...

Over the past decades, the idea that national sovereignty and the authority of the state have been increasingly challenged or even substantially eroded has been a dominant one. Economic globalization advancing a neo-liberal dis-embedding of the economy is seen as the major reason for this erosion. Concerns have increased about the negative conseque...

This paper explores the attempts to depict the global rise to dominance of the shareholder-oriented joint stock corporation as largely economically determined and to portray these corporations as fundamentally “private” in nature. By analyzing the economic nature of the joint stock companies (JSCs) that emerged in growing numbers in the nineteenth...

When writing about property and property rights in his imagined post-capitalist society of the future, Marx seemed to envisage ‘individual property’ co-existing with ‘socialized property’ in the means of production. As the social and political consequences of faltering growth and increasing inequality, debt and insecurity gradually manifest themsel...

In some contexts corporations are closely identified with their shareholders; in others they are regarded as ‘completely separate’ from them. This article explores the nature and historical origins of the schizophrenic ideas that flow from this, arguing that they underpin contemporary corporate irresponsibility. It suggests that these ideas are att...

This paper explores the attempts to de-politicize the corporate legal form and existing shareholder-oriented corporate governance structures, particularly in their Anglo-American versions, by depicting them as largely economically determined and fundamentally private in nature. Through an analysis of the historical emergence and development of the...

Corporations play a central role in modern economies. Certain beliefs about corporations and corporate law are widely held and relied upon by business experts, the financial press, and economists who study the firm. Unfortunately, some of these widely-held beliefs are mistaken. This has led to numerous common errors in the way corporate law concept...

The report examines the shortcomings of Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs (HMRC), the UK's tax collection and enforcement authority, and recommends reforms. It finds that HMRC lacks adequate resources and provides poor service to taxpayers. It is too close to big business and lacks adequate public accountability to be an effective enforcer of tax...

Using pension privatization as a vehicle, this article examines the neoliberal vision and the impact on it of the financial crisis. It argues that the vision is underlain by an economically determinist account of economic and social development which has had a major impact not only on economic and social policy but on legal policy and thinking abou...

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has risen to prominence with remarkable rapidity to become, in the words of The Economist, ‘an industry in itself, with full-time staff, newsletters, professional associations and massed armies of consultants’ (The Economist 2004). Embraced by corporations, touted by academics, and advanced by non-g...

This paper critically evaluates the contractual theories of companies and company law which have risen to prominence in recent years. It argues that history reveals as misguided the attempt to depict public companies as essentially contractual in nature, one of the most striking features of the development in nineteenth century Britain of the first...

In recent years a growing consensus has emerged in favour of the shareholder-oriented model of the corporation. Increasingly, this model is justified not on the basis of shareholder ownership rights but on efficiency grounds: whoever the immediate and direct beneficiaries of shareholder-orientation, it is argued, it ultimately indirectly benefits e...

Book reviewed in this article: Ron Harris, Industrializing English Law

Corporations are currently attracting more than the usual amount of attention from the Anglo-American left. At first glance, this might appear simply to be a product of "downsizing," stagnating wages and growing job insecurity coupled with spiraling profits, remuneration of top executives, and share prices. Markets cheer as jobs disappear. But on c...

The body has recently become the subject of much attention in radical academic circles. This article examines the work of a thinker, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who has written extensively about the body, but whose work has been neglected in these debates. It seeks to elucidate conservative ideas about sexuality and morality and, mo...

12 International Journal of the Sociology of Law 239-260 (22pp)