The Multinational Challenge to Corporation Law

Book excerpt: Modern multinational corporate groups of incredible complexity conducting world enterprises through numerous subsidiaries have rendered traditional corporation law archaic. The traditional concept of each corporation as a separate legal unit clashes with modern economic realities and frustrates effective regulation when applied to affiliated corporations collectively conducting a common enterprise. In response, there is emerging a law of corporate groups directed at the enterprise rather than its corporate components. As national legal systems begin to apply enterprise law to multinationals, including their foreign companies, the resulting extraterritorial application of national law inevitably leads to international controversy. Resolution of the problems presented by conflicting national regulation of multinational enterprises presents a major challenge to international law and foreign relations law, as well as to corporation law. This volume is a comprehensive review and analysis of these major legal developments and their economic and political implications. It concludes with a pathbreaking analysis of the jurisprudential implications of the changing corporate personality in enterprise law focusing on economic organization rather than on the conceptualized legal entity of yesterday.