Pardolesi, Roberto --- "Comment on John Armour, ‘Enforcement Strategies in UK Corporate Governance: A Roadmap and Empirical Assessment’" [2010] ELECD 405; in Pacces, M. Alessio (ed), "The Law and Economics of Corporate Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: The Law and Economics of Corporate Governance

Editor(s): Pacces, M. Alessio

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448971

Section Title: Comment on John Armour, ‘Enforcement Strategies in UK Corporate Governance: A Roadmap and Empirical Assessment’

Author(s): Pardolesi, Roberto

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

Comment on John Armour,
`Enforcement strategies in UK corporate
governance: a roadmap and empirical
assessment'
Roberto Pardolesi

The first thing to say is that John Armour is simply too smart, and his
chapter too sophisticated for my almost naïve command of the issues
canvassed in his pages. Given this huge handicap, I am forced to a candid
admission: the best that I can do is to stockpile a few, scattered remarks
and submit a couple of disingenuous questions.
Second, summing up very briefly the core of John Armour's argument.
Much in the vein of John Coffee, he denounces the inanity of an approach
focused entirely on the black letters of the law in the books, and stresses
the crucial role of the enforcement strategies, the law in action. This is why
he proposes an original taxonomy, based on a double-entry matrix for
enforcement: public/private, on the one hand, and formal/informal, on the
other. Relying on such a framework, he undertakes the ambitious project
of evaluating the contribution of each of the cells of the matrix in the realm
of the UK listed companies.
With the mastery of an economic scholar, John Armour, himself a
lawyer, collects crude figures about private formal enforcement, a category
including minority shareholder suits (the mythical derivative actions),
securities litigation concerning misleading statements or omissions in dis-
closure, and insolvency litigation. His conclusion concerning the effective-
ness of this kind of disparate pressure is merciless: it appears close to nil.
With ...