American corporate law is built on a metaphor of a race: states compete to supply corporate law. For nearly half a century, corporate law scholarship has revolved around endemic questions about whether other states put competitive pressure on Delaware, and whether this competition is normatively desirable.

There is a missing piece to this important body of scholarship. In my article, Delaware’s New Competition (forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review and available on SSRN), I introduce foreign nations as emerging lawmakers that compete with American states in the increasingly globalizing market for corporate law. In recent decades, entrepreneurial foreign nations in offshore islands—principally the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda—have attracted publicly traded American corporations by offering permissive corporate governance rules and specialized business courts.

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