Roberta Romano located The Genius of American Corporate Law in its federal structure and its use of the forces of competition to drive the states to enact rules which offer an efficient level of protection to investors. However, as we have seen, it is inappropriate to extend the agency model assumptions underlying her argument to an analysis of EC corporate governance regulation, given that many Member States adopt at least some elements of a productive coalition approach to corporate governance regulation. The genius of EC corporate governance regulation is more obscure, and cannot be explained entirely by reference to the tenets of either the agency or the productive coalition models. However, it can still be found, and this book has sought to demonstrate that it lies in the willingness of EC law to combine a wide range of regulatory techniques in pursuit of an appropriate balance between the supranational interest in market integration and the Member States' diverse interests in regulating corporate governance in pursuit of nationally defined public goods.

The EC became involved in positive, instrumental regulation of company law and the legal aspects of corporate governance because the Commission took the view that differences in national regulation distort resource allocation in the single market, and because, without guarantees that their public goods requirements would be met by EC law, the Member States were unwilling to abandon a number of protective rules which lay beyond the scope of the EC Treaty.