Introducing the Centros@20 Series

This post introduces the ‘Centros@20 Series’, a special series of posts based on contributions to the ‘Centros and European Company Law: Twenty Years of Living Dangerously’ conference that took place in Oxford on 15 March 2019.

March 2019 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Centros case (C-212/97), without doubt the most influential judgment rendered by the (then) Court of Justice in the field of European company law. Along with Überseering (2002) and Inspire Art (2003), Centros eased the cross-border mobility of corporations in the European Union. This sparked regulatory arbitrage, chiefly in the form of incorporating continental European firms as English private limited companies. That, in turn, prompted defensive regulatory competition, such as national reviews of legal capital and company formation regimes, and calls for a top-down harmonisation of corporate standards.

Against this backdrop, the editors of the Oxford Business Law Blog selected ‘Centros and European Company Law: Twenty Years of Living Dangerously’ as the theme of its third annual conference. Two weeks before Brexit was supposed to become effective, the conference provided a forum to discuss the present and future of European Company Law. In addition, the theme invited a broader reflection on the dynamics of regulatory arbitrage and competition within the European continent and beyond, both in company law and adjacent areas.

The Academic and the Associate Editors of the Oxford Business Law Blog are glad to announce that, in the next weeks, the posts of the conference participants will be published on the OBLB. The series will start tomorrow with a post by Alvaro Pereira, summarizing the conference proceedings. The summary post will be subsequently updated to include hyperlinks to the other posts in the series.

Horst Eidenmüller and Luca Enriques, on behalf of the Academic and Associate Editors of the Oxford Business Law Blog.