LAW-2432 Global Entities Markets
Large corporations are invariably multinational entities and, indeed, business entities of any substantial scale are frequently multinational actors. This poses challenges for businesses, and the various jurisdiction in which they operate. This mini-course is an introduction for students to the legal problems and challenges that arise for businesses operating across jurisdictions and for sovereign states in regulating business activities that cross territorial lines, both in terms of applicable legal principles and from a policy perspective. In some respects, entities are able to affect which jurisdiction's laws should govern their business affairs and transactions, while in other respects a jurisdiction's connection to the conduct and effects of a particular business is sufficient to warrant the imposition of that jurisdiction's legal norms. The course will explore these issues by examining different contexts in which the laws of jurisdiction are selected by businesses or imposed on businesses to govern their affairs. These contexts include internal affairs, regulatory jurisdiction, extraterritoriality and choice of law through private ordering. While the course will introduce well-established jurisdictional principles applied in conventional business contexts, it will also explore and evaluate the suitability of their application to social media and internet companies and will include a field trip to Twitter (Ireland)'s corporate headquarters. The course will assume that students have had no prior exposure to business law.