Critical Commercial and Corporate Law Symposium

The symposium is designed to develop a book on critical approaches to commercial and corporate law and to enhance critical thinking is these areas. It brings together leading scholars in commercial and corporate law who will present their chapters for discussion and development. The dearth of critical texts in commercial and corporate law impacts on the way these subjects are treated in otherwise ‘law in context’ law schools.

Commercial and corporate courses are often taught in a standardly doctrinal fashion. Few law schools attempt to draw out the contextual and critical aspects of these areas. This can be partly explained by their increasingly complex nature, making it difficult to cover sufficient law within the constraints of a standard module and thus limiting time for a more critical appraisal. However, this neglect can also be explained by these subjects relegation to core necessary subjects, which apply to practice but are not areas worthy of serious intellectual appraisal. They are expected to be difficult, dry and practical with no political significance, no radical implications and no intellectual credibility.

The symposium and the resulting publication will go some way to redressing this imbalance between subjects deemed intellectual and subjects deemed professional. The book will be published by Palgrave in their ‘Great Debates’ series.

• Download the programme (pdf)