Why Delaware LLCs?
For years, scholars have debated why parties choose to incorporate under Delaware law companies that operate businesses in other states — since different answers to this question lead to different normative assessments of the practice. Traditionally, this debate focused on public corporations and ignored private firms and non-corporate forms of business. The exploding use of limited liability companies (LLCs) instead of corporations, and the formation of LLCs under Delaware law to operate businesses outside Delaware, call for expanding this discourse to ask “Why Delaware LLCs?”. This article adds to the recent literature seeking to answer this question empirically. It critiques recent studies that looked for statistically significant correlations between state of formation choices for LLCs and differences in state LLC statutes and legal infrastructure. Finding this methodology suffers from inherent limitations, this article presents results from a different approach. I interviewed business attorneys whose clients have formed LLCs and asked them a battery of questions designed to ascertain why their clients formed LLCs in Delaware. The results of this survey provide important insights into the aspects of Delaware’s substantive LLC law and its legal infrastructure that motivate formation of Delaware LLCs, and thereby serve as an important complement to the existing statistical studies.
The European Private Company: Do We Need Another 28th Private Company Law Form in the EU? On Regulatory Competition of Corporate Law
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are of vital importance for employment, innovation and growth in the EU member states. However, so far only a rather small number participates in international business activities. The European private company is intended to support SMEs’ internationalization. In this paper we analyse whether such an additional supranational legal form is necessary. In a first step we show that from the normative point of view of interjurisdictional competition arguments from welfare economics, public choice and evolutionary economics are mainly in favour of it. In a next step we ask from a positive point of view whether it is nevertheless necessary at all. We discuss to what extent horizontal competition on legal forms is already working within the EU. We find that there is some competition taking place, however, so far it does not address specifically the needs of SMEs when doing business internationally.
A sustainable development indicator for NGOs and international organisations
The article offers an easy-to-use indicator for measuring whether NGOs, international organisations and government policies and projects meet the criteria for sustainable development that have been established by the Rio Declaration in 1992 and that are recognised by experts in the field. Use of this indicator reveals that most of the major actors in the field of development are actually failing to promote sustainable development and points to the specific areas where they need to improve in order to fulfil sustainability criteria. We also offer a sample test of the indicator using UNICEF as a case study.