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What is Corporate Law
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What is the common structure of the law of business corporations—or, as it would be put in some jurisdictions, company law—across different national jurisdictions? Although this question is rarely asked by corporate law scholars, it is critically important for the comparative investigation of corporate law. Recent scholarship often emphasizes the divergence among European, American, and Japanese corporations in corporate governance, share ownership, capital markets, and business culture.1 But, notwithstanding the very real differences across jurisdictions along these dimensions, the underlying uniformity of the corporate form is at least as impressive. Business corporations have a fundamentally similar set of legal characteristics—and face a fundamentally similar set of legal problems—in all jurisdictions.
Consider, in this regard, the basic legal characteristics of the business corporation. To anticipate our discussion below, there are five of these characteristics, most of which will be easily recognizable to anyone familiar with business affairs. They are: legal personality, limited liability, transferable shares, delegated management under a board structure, and investor ownership. These characteristics respond—in ways we will explore—to the economic exigencies of the large modern business enterprise. Thus, corporate law everywhere must, of necessity, provide for them. To be sure, there are other forms of business enterprise that lack one or more of these characteristics. But the remarkable fact—and the fact that we wish to stress—is that, in market economies, almost all large-scale business firms adopt a legal form that possesses all five of the basic characteristics of the business corporation. Indeed, most small jointly-owned firms adopt this corporate form as well, although sometimes with deviations from one or more of the five basic characteristics to fit their special needs.
It follows that a principal function of corporate law is to provide business enterprises with a legal form that possesses these five core attributes. By making this form widely available and user-friendly, corporate law enables entrepreneurs to transact easily through the medium of the corporate entity, and thus lowers the costs of conducting business. Of course, the number of provisions that the typical corporation statute2 devotes to defining the corporate form is likely to be only a small part of the statute as a whol
John Armour, Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman - Personal Name
1st Edition
1936-5357
NONE
What is Corporate Law
Management
English
2001
1-37
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