When: Wednesday, October 16, 2024, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PMWhere: Online via Zoom
Speaker: Prof. Holger Spamann
The London Financial Regulation Seminar is an inter-collegiate and inter-disciplinary group of experts led by CCLS and our Institute of Banking and Finance under the leadership of Professor Rosa M. Lastra and Dr. Daniele D’Alvia.
On Wednesday 16 October, Prof. Holger Spamann discussed one of his landmark research articles titled “Indirect investor protection: the investment ecosystem and its legal underpinnings” published on the Journal of Legal Analysis, Volume 14, Issue 1 (2022). Prof. Rosa M. Lastra chaired the event, and Dr. Daniele D’Alvia was the discussant.
Prof. Holger Spamann is the Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches corporate law and corporate finance. His research focuses on the law and economics of corporate governance and financial markets, judicial behaviour, and comparative law. Before embarking on his academic career, he practice with Debevoise & Plimpton in New York and clerked for two years in Europe. He holds too many degrees, among them a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is a member of the bar of New York and qualified for the German bar.
Dr. Daniele D’Alvia is a Lecturer in Banking and Finance Law at CCLS – Queen Mary University of London, and an Associate Researcher at the European Banking Institute in Frankfurt. He is an internationally recognised expert on Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, Corporate Finance Law, M&A, and Financial Regulation. A pioneer in SPAC studies in law, authored of the first book on SPACs ever published by Routledge in 2021, and award-winner of the Colin B. Picker Prize by the American Society of Comparative Law.
Professor Spamann argues in his research article that the key mechanisms protecting portfolio investors in public corporate securities are indirect. They do not rely on actions by the investors or by any private actor charged with looking after investors’ interests. Rather, they are provided by the ecosystem that investors (are legally forced to) inhabit, as a by-product of the self-interested, mutually and legally constrained behaviour of third parties without a mandate to help the investors such as speculators, activists, and plaintiff lawyers. This elucidates key rules, resolves the mandatory versus enabling tension in corporate / securities law, and exposes the current system’s fragile reliance on trading.
Watch this event on YouTube