Remus joined the School of Law in May 2011. Prior to taking up his appointment in Edinburgh, Remus studied at McGill University, Montreal (Doctor of Civil Law), University of Alberta, Edmonton (Master of Laws) and Nicolae Titulescu University, Bucharest (Bachelor of Civil Law). Remus also studied comparative law in Strasbourg, European business law in Turin, and Austrian Economics in New York. Before joining the academia, Remus practised as corporate and commercial lawyer with a major Romanian law office.

Remus’ main research interests lie in the  field of fiduciary obligations, with a focus on company law, trust law and Law and Economics. In his doctoral thesis, Remus analyses the content and justification of the notion of fiduciary duties in private law relations. His doctoral research is focused on the ways in which private law rules guide a legal actors’ exercise of discretion over another’s interests. Similar to administrative law, the private law no-conflict duties aim to prevent a decision-maker’s self-interest (or another core fiduciary duty) from interfering, in a conscious or subconscious way, with the core fiduciary duty to exercise judgment based on relevant considerations. While what constitutes a relevant consideration can be determined objectively, the weight to be ascribed to each relevant factor is left at the fiduciary’s subjective appreciation.

In his Masters dissertation, Remus analyses the fiduciary duties of corporate directors from a corporate finance perspective. The dissertation provides a legally and economically valid model for understanding directors’ duties to act in the best interests of the corporation. Directors’ obligation to maximize the value of the firm can be construed as the obligation to select the projects that generate the highest discounted value of future cash flow streams (the projects that have the highest expected net present value). The high NPV projects align the best interests of the corporation, regarded as a separate legal entity, with the economic interests of shareholders and creditors.

Remus welcomes LLM and PhD enquiries which relate generally to his fields of interest. In particular, he would be interested in supervising research on fiduciary duties in corporate and trust law.