Journal articles
Year
2018
Abstract
Our article explores the transplantation of the corporate opportunities doctrine, largely based on the US model, to France and Germany. In Germany, the law historically prohibited officers of the corporation from engaging in competing business activities; the statutory prohibition applied to some but not all corporate opportunities, and also left open some space for the corporate opportunity doctrine to move into. The German version of the doctrine developed gradually over the past fifty years and owes its adoption to a number of academics who studied US law and reinterpreted a number of cases – where it was clear that an officer had violated his duties to the corporation – in light of the newly discovered doctrine. By contrast, it was not until late 2011 that French courts recognized for the first time that a director may not appropriate a corporate opportunity. As the core thesis of the paper, we show that there is a considerable degree of convergence relating to the corporate opportunities doctrine, which has radiated primarily from US law to the two civil law jurisdictions.
GELTER, M. et HELLERINGER, G. (2018). Opportunity Makes a Thief: Corporate Opportunities as Legal Transplant and Convergence in Corporate Law. Berkeley Business Law Journal, 15(1), pp. 92-153.
Keywords