Watch the NZ book launch: “Hidden Fallacies in Corporate Law and Financial Regulation”

A new scholarly volume challenges theories underpinning modern corporate law and financial regulation. A video of the New Zealand book launch is available to view.

At the launch of Hidden Fallacies in Corporate Law and Financial Regulation: Reframing the Mainstream Narratives, four contributors joined Juncture’s Director, Professor Susan Watson. They questioned some of the most widely accepted assumptions in these fields, arguing that many are in fact fallacies.

Opening the discussion, Watson invited the audience to consider the “ideas that quietly shape how we think about corporations, markets, and regulation”, concepts so familiar they often escape scrutiny.

The book’s contributors challenge a wide array of longstanding orthodoxies, from agency theory to the virtues of financial innovation. They interrogate the view of corporations as purely private entities and explore the complexities of financial disclosure in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. 

“The book is a call to rethink some of our foundational assumptions and to reimagine how corporate and financial law might better serve the public good in an age of rapid tech and technological, social, and environmental change,” says Watson.

The launch event was co-hosted at the University of Auckland Business School by:
ALTeR: Center for Advancing Law and Technology Responsibly
Juncture: Dialogues on Inclusive Capitalism
Aotearoa Centre for Leadership and Governance

Panellists 

Saule T. Omarova
Earle Hepburn Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Roosevelt Institute. Her scholarship focuses on U.S. bank regulation, financial innovation and financial technology, systemic risk dynamics and structural trends in global financial markets, finance as a tool of economic development, and law and macroeconomy. Prior to joining academia, she practiced banking law at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a premier New York law firm, and served at the U.S. Treasury Department as Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. In 2021, Professor Omarova was President Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Northwestern University.

Jennifer Hill
Inaugural Bob Baxt AO Chair and Professor in Corporate and Commercial Law and Director of the Centre for Commercial Law & Regulatory Studies (CLARS) at Monash University Faculty of Law. Jennifer writes in the area of comparative corporate governance and is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and Vice-Chair of the Global Corporate Governance Colloquia (GCGC). She is an Academic Fellow of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Finance and EU Law (EUSFiL) at the University of Genoa; a Life Member of Clare Hall Cambridge; an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Society of Corporate Law Academics (SCoLA); and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law (AAL). Jennifer has held visiting positions at several international law schools, including Cambridge University; Cornell; NYU; and Vanderbilt University. Her research has been cited by courts in Australia and the United States.

Claire A. Hill
Claire A. Hill is a Professor and James L. Krusemark Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is the founding director of the Law School’s Institute for Law and Rationality, the associate director of its Institute for Law and Economics, an affiliated faculty member of the University’s Center for Cognitive Sciences and its Center for Political Psychology, and a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin. Professor Hill is a member of the American Law Institute and an associate reporter on its Compliance and Enforcement for Organizations project. Professor Hill has published numerous articles and book chapters in journals and books in the U.S. and Europe, and has co-edited several volumes, in the fields of corporate governance, structured finance, rating agencies, contract theory, law and language, and behavioral economics, including on the role of culture, personality and identity in banks and other organizations.

Alexandra Andhov
Director of the Center for Advancing Law and Technology Responsibly (ALTeR). Professor and inaugural Chair in Law and Technology, she holds joint chairs in the Faculty of Business and Economics and the Faculty of Law. Professor Andhov’s research focuses on corporate law, capital market law, and the regulation of emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. She has published extensively in leading European and U.S. law journals and with esteemed publishers like Hart Publishing, Cambridge University Press, or Edward Elgar. Her notable works include Computational Law, which explores the intersection of computational and legal thinking, and the recent anthology Fallacies in Corporate and Financial Law, which interrogates long-standing assumptions and beliefs upon which corporate and financial law have been built that have remained unexamined for decades.

Event facilitator:

Susan Watson
Director of Juncture: Dialogues on Inclusive Capitalism, Professor and Acting Dean of the University of Auckland Law School. She holds joint chairs in the Faculty of Business and Economics and the Faculty of Law. Susan researches and teaches primarily corporate law and corporate governance. She has a particular interest in the corporate form and in her research seeks to understand how the form developed, why it is so successful, and the economic and societal impact of corporations.

Photo credits: Chris Loufte, Media Productions, University of Auckland