INTRODUCTION

The private conception of the corporation still dominates. Public interests, thus, play a limited role in corporate law. Even though some representatives of academia call for public interests to be broadly integrated into corporate law, they have not formed a common understanding of the term public interest. Alternately, it is used to address the interest of society as a whole or part of it or as a normative standard. Corporate law does not provide for theoretical foundation to add to this approach, since it does not consider public interests. It predominantly focuses on the organisational coordination of private interests by offering individual legal persons a means to cooperate and pursue their common interests.

From the main focus of corporate law on private interests it does not follow that public interests would be entirely irrelevant. On the one hand, legislators are pursuing certain objectives with corporate law that are dedicated to a broader public interest. Section 4 aims to elaborate on these objectives in order to shed light on the public interest of corporate law that can be drawn from these objectives. On the other hand, corporate laws consider with different intensity the interests of parties especially affected by corporate law, like creditors and minority shareholders. The protection of the interests of these stakeholders, in response to the direct negative externalities of corporate law, is the objective of certain provisions of corporate law. Such interests might be interpreted as secondary or complementing public interests of corporate law with regard to a certain group of people.

In times of crisis, policy debates are likely to interfere with the private conception of the corporation theory by requiring large or very relevant corporations to consider certain public interests. The corporate social responsibility movement generally claims that corporations should be forced to consider social interests. Thereby, it supports any political movement that aims to bind corporations to public interests. After the financial crisis of 2008 several laws have been enacted on a European level that either force certain relevant corporations to consider public interests or bind them to more stringent regulation due to their public relevance.