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An examination is made of the impact of constituent lobbying activity on accounting regulators during the transformation of the Fourth European Company Law Directive into German accounting law. Using detailed published commentaries prepared by representative organizations on draft accounting legislation, evidence is provided concerning the preferences of the three primary German accounting constituencies – industry preparers, auditors, and academic experts. Initially, a model that merely distinguishes between the three constituencies suggests that the industry lobby group representing preparers exerts the greatest influence on the decisions of the German legislature. However, when the empirical model is extended to include all two-way interaction effects, the relative power of preparers is seen to be far lower, with the influence exerted by industry depending crucially on the support of at least one of the remaining lobby groups.

Examines the politics of accounting regulation when collective forces and social arrangements appear to mitigate potential conflict. Specifically, the process through which accounting law was redrafted in Austria in preparation for EU (European Union) membership is investigated, paying particular attention to the changes in the legal text of the Financial Reporting Act between the Ministerial and Governmental drafts. The Ministerial draft was the outcome of discussions between representatives of employers, employees, academics, and accountants in an attempt to reach consensus on the legal text in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice. These deliberations took place behind closed doors, but were followed by a process of public consultation. In these circumstances, it was possible to identify changes in those aspects of accounting law to which the main parties could not at first agree, and hence to assess the unconditional influence of powerful groups that is exercised in circumstances where disagreement between the parties is already apparent.

This chapter argues that criminal law scholars have tended to draw too close an analogy between the system of criminal law and that of private morality. In place of such a ‘legal moralist’ account, this chapter offers a ‘public law’ account of the criminal justice system, which conceives of the operations of the criminal justice system, insofar as they are legitimate, as concerned with the basic question of public law: when the use of state power is legitimate. Like the new legal moralism of Duff and Gardner, this account is an attempt to justify the workings of the criminal justice system by demonstrating that they are just what is required for us to be true to a set of roles and relationships that have intrinsic value. But the relevant roles and relationships for criminal justice are not those we understand from ordinary morality. Rather, they are the legally defined roles — such as private citizen, police officer, judge, etc. — that we take up within a larger constitutional order that, we could not abolish without abandoning necessary preconditions for our moral life.

This chapter examines and poses questions to Marc Lange’s account of laws and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particles has a lesser grade of necessity than do laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties. The problem many regularity theorists face regarding laws is the fact that many regularities are true, but only some of them correspond to laws. The trick for the regularity theorist is to pick from among the regularities those for which the addition of the nomic operator “it is a law that…” is truth-preserving, while excluding those for which that operator bears a falsehood. Lange’s starting question is very similar to that posed for the regularity theorist, although he himself is not one of them.

This chapter focuses on the regulation of corporations as “issuers,” that is, as tools to raise finance from the public. All representative “core jurisdictions” have specific rules applying to the offer of securities to the public and to the ongoing governance and disclosure of companies whose securities are held by the investing public. While motivated by the need to protect investors, their economic function is rather in supporting capital markets as an efficient tool to allocate capital among corporations. This requires that markets are informationally efficient and prices are sufficiently informative. After reviewing the reasons why legal rules are held to be necessary to attain of the goal of price informativeness, the chapter examines mandatory disclosure frameworks. It highlights similarities and differences in issuer disclosure rules, assesses the degree of convergence in accounting law, and describes the use of other strategies, including banning insider trading and market manipulation (i.e., securities fraud). Public and private enforcement and gatekeeper control are examined, highlighting the gap in enforcement intensity between the U.S. and other jurisdictions.