I am Professor of Commercial Law at Hanken School of Economics, Vaasa, Finland. You could say that the areas of my research and teaching at Hanken have included commercial law, contract law, company law, corporate governance, corporate finance law, electricity trade and climate change law, the law of the digital economy, EU law and comparative law. But this does not really describe what I do since such labels tend to reflect normal legal science that largely is pragmatic, dogmatic and non-scientific.
To build something new, I chose to turn commercial law into a scientific discipline with its own theory-building and qualitative research methods. To make this possible, I had to think out of the box and define a new form of legal science. I call it User-Friendly Legal Science.
User-Friendly Legal Science has its own point of view (how actors can use legal tools and practices to reach their objectives in different contexts) and qualitative research methods (with the documentation of legal tools and practices as the discipline-specific primary source). Since User-Friendly Legal Science primarily focuses on rational behaviour rather than legal norms, we talk about "primary sources" rather than "sources of law".
The new discipline or research approach made it possible to define, for the first time, commercial law as a theory-based scientific discipline. This is because actors use legal tools and practices to reach their objectives in market contexts. It is possible to describe patterns of rational behaviour based on the study of the discipline-specific primary sources. I first focused on the firm in Management-Based Commercial Law.
I talk about Management-Based Commercial Law when the actor is the ideal-typical firm. I talk about User-Friendly Commercial Law when the actor is not a firm. In the latter case, the actor can also be the state.
In my scientific commercial law, I distinguish between the legal entity, shareholders and the firm. It is characteristic of much of my research to treat the ideal-typical firm as the principal of the principal-agent theory. The firm can thus incur its own agency costs. This has helped to understand the behaviour of firms in many traditional contexts such as contracts, corporate governance and corporate finance. Focusing on what firms do has also made it possible to increase corporate relevance in education and give better guidance to firms.
The new discipline or research approach has many potential applications in other areas of legal science and is not limited to commercial law.
I have so far authored 11 monographs:
Stocks for All: People’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. De Gruyter 2021/2022.
User-friendly Legal Science: A New Scientific Discipline. Springer 2017.
EU Electricity Trade Law: The Legal Tools of Electricity Producers in the Internal Market. Springer 2015.
Organising the Firm: Theories of Commercial Law, Corporate Governance and Corporate Law. Springer 2012.
The Law of Corporate Finance: General Principles and EU Law. Volume I: Cash Flow, Risk, Agency, Information. Springer 2010.
The Law of Corporate Finance: General Principles and EU Law. Volume II: Contracts in General. Springer 2010.
The Law of Corporate Finance: General Principles and EU Law. Volume III: Funding, Exit, Takeovers. Springer 2010.
Comparative Corporate Governance. Shareholders as a Rule-maker. Springer 2005.
Osakeyhtiö toimijana. WSOY 2002.
Arvopaperinvälittäjästä sijoitusneuvoja. Lakimiesliiton Kustannus 2001.
Mängelhaftung beim Kauf von Gesellschaftsanteilen - eine vergleichende Untersuchung zum deutschen, finnischen und schwedischen Recht. Svenska handelshögskolan 1998 (dissertation).
