Research Handbook on Shareholder Inspection Rights: A Comparative Perspective

Shareholder inspection rights form an important tool for shareholder protection. They offer shareholders seeking information private access to specific books and records of the company that are otherwise not publicly available. While there has been a discourse on the topic in some jurisdictions such as Delaware (USA), it has not received scholarly treatment at an international level. This Research Handbook seeks to alter that, and signifies the first endeavor to engage in a comprehensive and comparative analysis of shareholder inspection rights across 19 different jurisdictions representing five continents.

Themes emerging from the study include the historical evolution of inspection rights, the statutory design of the inspection regime, how inspection rights interact with disclosure norms under securities regulation, and the manner in which inspection rights are actually utilized by shareholders. While there is some commonality among jurisdictions, the larger story is one of divergence, which is understandable since local needs tend to drive the design and operation of the regime.

The Research Handbook on Shareholder Inspection Rights is invaluable to academics, scholars, and students working in the area of corporate law and governance, legal practitioners working in corporate law and, in particular, shareholder litigation and regulators and government bodies overseeing the corporate sector, including corporate and securities regulators.

Edited by Randall S. Thomas, John S. Beasley II Chair in Law and Business, Director, Law and Business Program, Professor of Management, Owen Graduate School of Management and School of Law, Vanderbilt University, US, Paolo Giudici, Professor of Business Law, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and Umakanth Varottil, Associate Professor of Law, National University of Singapore, Singapore