Organisers

Dr Victoria Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She works on the history of business, its form and regulation in law and society. She has published around 50 articles, chapters and review essays on company law, corporate governance, bank regulation and, more recently, on the legal profession. She is Co-editor of Business History, a journal ranked 4/4* by the Academic Journal Guide (formerly Chartered Association of Business School’s Guide) and Book Review Editor for the Journal of Legal History, the only British journal concerned solely with legal history. She convenes the Legal History section for the Society of Legal Scholars. 

Dr Jonathan Hardman is a Lecturer in International Commercial Law at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to his appointment, he was a solicitor in private practice for 10 years and an honorary lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He writes on, and has considerable practical experience in, a wide range of commercial law matters (especially rights in security and company law). He been published widely in Scotland, England, Europe and in the US. He is the convenor of the Law Society of Scotland’s Banking, Company and Insolvency Law Policy Sub-Committee, and convenes the Company Law stream for the Society of Legal Scholars (United Kingdom).

Professor Sally Wheeler is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law at the Australian National University. She holds a Visiting Professorship at University College Dublin and previously was Head of the School of Law and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise at Queen’s Belfast. She served on the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panels in 2001 and 2008. She is a socio-legal scholar working in the areas of contract and corporate law. She is the author or co-author of several books on corporate governance, over 80 articles or chapters, and she has edited or co-edited nine other books. Her most recent work has been on contracts, technology and human rights in Australia’s largest listed companies.

The Global Corporate Law brings together those exploring the company regulation from around the globe. In the present era of de-globalisation, policy-makers have been either slow, reluctant or unwilling to recognise the importance of global exchanges. Following the disruption to supply chains in the wake of Brexit and now the conflict in Ukraine, there is now widespread acknowledgement that commerce is global in nature. Yet, the international commercial exchanges are not themselves new. Companies have long looked to new markets to expand and entrepreneurs have built new customer bases overseas since time immemorial. Traders have often sought finance, agents or intermediaries to facilitate the sale of goods. Law, of course, influences the terms of commercial transactions at all levels.