Professor Vanessa Finch, NAB 6.09

For LLM and MSc Law and Accounting students.

This course is capped at 30 students. Students must apply through Graduate Course Choice on LSEforYou.

This course focuses primarily on registered companies and is concerned with the principles and policies underlying the legal treatment of corporate insolvency and corporate rescue. The course considers how the nature of the problems raised by insolvency varies and is dependent on the legal identity of the insolvent (for example, whether the insolvent is a company with limited liability or an individual running a business) and the course examines the legal responses to these problems. The formal legal procedures available for dealing with companies in distress are analysed as are informal approaches to corporate failure. The impact of these procedures and approaches on third parties, for example directors and employees, is also considered.

Part I - Role, Objectives and Characteristics of Insolvency Law

1.    Introduction: Aims and Objectives
2.    Outline of procedures
3.    The legal identity of the enterprise, the significance of limited liability and the problem of corporate groups
4.    Causes of corporate failure. Who goes bankrupt?

Part II - Averting Liquidation and Bankruptcy

5.    Rescue Procedures: informal rescues
6.    Rescue Procedures: formal corporate rescue procedures
7.    Business rescues - comparative approaches: USA, Chapter 11

Part III - Liquidation

8.    Control of Procedures
9.    Setting Aside Transactions
10.  The Pari Passu Principle and Preferential Claims
11.  Secured Creditors and Security Devices

Part IV - Administration of Insolvency Regimes
12. Insolvency Practitioners and the Insolvency Service

Part V - Repercussions of Insolvency on Individuals
13. Company directors
14. Employees

Weekly seminars (LL439) of two hours duration throughout the Session.

Students are given the opportunity to submit two 2,000 word essays.

A full Reading List will be distributed during the course. The recommended text is V. Finch, Corporate Insolvency Law: Perspectives and Principles (Cambridge University Press, 2009) (2nd edition). Wider background reading will include some comparative law reform and other material including: The Report of the Review Committee on Insolvency Law and Practice (Cork Report) (Cmnd 8558, 1982); T H Jackson, The Logic and Limits of Bankruptcy Law, Harvard (1986).

A three-hour written examination at the end of the course.