Indispensable volume on company law
An essential book for anyone whose business it is to know and to implement or operate Irish company law
Thomas Courtney, a partner in Arthur Cox solicitors, is well known for his authorship of the leading Irish textbook on company law, The Law of Private Companies, the most recent edition of which was published as far back as 2002.
In the intervening years, Dr Courtney has chaired the Company Law Review Group, a statutory body entrusted with the task of reporting annually on areas of company law that require reform.
Moreover, the review group has, over a number of years, been drafting a new Companies Act that will codify all company law in Ireland. The scheme of a Bill for this new Act has already been published and it is widely anticipated that the Bill proper will be initiated in the Oireachtas in the very near future with a view to its passing into law, on a conservative estimate, sometime in 2014.
Dr Courtney is playing a unique and valuable role, not merely in relation to company law, but in the development of our legal infrastructure to make Ireland a very good place in which to establish and carry on enterprise. Few people have had the privilege of both devising our laws and commenting on them in the form of authoring the acknowledged leading textbook in the field.
On this occasion, Dr Courtney is joined by two co-authors, Brian Hutchinson, who collaborated in the second edition, and Daibhi O'Leary, who is supplying legal and accountancy perspectives.
The new Companies Bill will repeal and consolidate all 16 statutes which currently constitute the main corpus of our company law as well as a large variety of statutory instruments. The new bill will also enact as statutory law equitable rules relating to company law.
For the first time, the primary model of the company in legislation will be the private company. The 1963 Act used as its primary model public companies and dealt with private companies as exceptions. As the Company Law Review Group argued, the private company is the de facto norm, and therefore it makes eminent sense that our company law provisions reflect that reality.
The new Bill will have more than 1,400 sections and its first 15 parts will be concerned with the private model of company.
Apart from providing an authoritative text and commentary, the third edition brings together a considerable amount of case law, Irish and foreign, between its covers. It goes without saying that this book is indispensable for anyone whose business it is to know and to implement or operate Irish company law.
