Corporate governance’s rise to prominence – the British experience

Speaker: Professor Brian R. Cheffins, University of Cambridge
Chair: Professor Alan Dignam, Queen Mary, University of London
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2014-15

About this lecture

Corporate governance was largely unknown as a concept in Britain prior to the issuance of the Cadbury Committee’s report on the topic in 1992.  It is widely acknowledged that the report, combined with corporate governance scandals occurring when the Cadbury Committee was deliberating, changed the situation markedly.  What is less well known is that broader trends were present that created promising conditions for corporate governance’s rise to prominence.  This lecture will identify these broader trends and in so doing help to explain why what can be referred to as a corporate governance “industry” took shape in Britain following the Cadbury Report.

Developments in the United States, where corporate governance initially came to prominence in the 1970s, help to put the British experience into context.  In the U.S. changing market conditions and a deregulation movement affecting a wide range of industries provided corporate executives of the 1980s and 1990s with unprecedented discretion in relation to companies growing in size.  This enhanced discretion could potentially be exercised in a manner prejudicial to shareholders’ interests and improved corporate governance functioned as a potentially beneficial corrective.  This lecture will indicate that similar trends were present in the U.K. as the 20th century drew to a close.  Correspondingly, even without the Cadbury Report and corporate scandals of the early 1990s corporate governance likely would have come to prominence in the U.K. before long. 

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About the speaker

Brian R. Cheffins has been since 1998 the S.J. Berwin Professor of Corporate Law at Cambridge University. He began his academic career at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Law, where he taught from 1986 to 1997. Professor Cheffins has held visiting appointments at Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. His primary research interests are corporate governance and corporate law, with particular reference to economic and historical aspects. Professor Cheffins is the author of Company Law: Theory, Structure and Operation (Oxford, 1997), The Trajectory of (Corporate Law) Scholarship (Cambridge, 2004) and Corporate Ownership and Control: British Business Transformed (Oxford, 2008). 

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues. It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

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