Priestley 11 · Usually third year
Corporations Law for Australian law students
Corporations is the most statutory of the Priestley subjects. The Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) does most of the work, and the case law is mostly about how a provision applies rather than what the principle is. That makes section pinpoints matter more here than almost anywhere else in the degree.
What the subject covers
- Separate legal personality, limited liability, and lifting the corporate veil
- The Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and the role of the regulator
- Directors' duties, statutory and general law, and the business judgment rule
- Members' remedies, oppression, and the statutory derivative action
- Corporate governance and the decision-making organs of a company
- Shares, fundraising and disclosure
- External administration and insolvent trading
Topic coverage varies between law schools and between jurisdictions. Your subject guide is the one that counts.
Cases you will meet in an Australian Corporations Law course
Three decisions that turn up in Corporations Law across Australian law schools. Some of them are English decisions that Australian courses still teach as core authority, so this is a list of what you will be taught rather than a list of Australian judgments. Treat it as a starting point rather than a reading list. Your course sets its own, and it is the one that counts.
Salomon v A Salomon and Co Ltd
[1897] AC 22
Separate legal personality, and the foundation the whole subject sits on.
Gambotto v WCP Ltd
(1995) 182 CLR 432
Limits on the power of a majority to alter a constitution to expropriate shares.
Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Hellicar
(2012) 247 CLR 345
The care and diligence duty, and the standard expected of a board.
How the subject is assessed
A problem question on directors' duties or oppression is close to standard, and the exam usually requires you to work from the section rather than from a case summary. Research essays tend to sit on governance and regulatory questions.
Using CaseSharp for Corporations
Problem questions
Start from the provision, then find the authority on how it has been applied. Answers arrive with the authorities attached and each citation opens at the paragraph.
Case notes
Corporations case notes are usually on a regulatory proceeding with a long procedural history. A brief keeps the issue and the holding separate from the narrative.
AGLC4 essays
Legislation pinpoints, subsections and paragraph references are the whole game here. The generator returns full form and short form and flags what it cannot parse instead of guessing.
Exam scaffolds
Scaffold by duty and by remedy, with the section number first and the case second. Check the citing cases for the case column before the exam.
CaseSharp is a research and study tool. It does not write your problem question answer or your research essay. Every substantive output carries a human-review notice, and where there is no authority to support an answer, Sharp says so instead of inventing a case to fill the gap.
Try it on a Corporations question
Create a free account and run a Corporations query like the one below, so you can see what comes back before you decide anything.
directors duty of care and diligence Hellicar
73,000 audited Australian decisions, current to the end of April 2026.