The rise of large business corporations in the late nineteenth century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's (1897) little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations was an original attempt to...

The purpose of this symposium is to shed light on the genealogy of the idea of a business corporation, an economic institution which has long been regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Each of the four original contributions addresses the history of some of its key features. In the...

Many legal systems have been converging toward a US shareholder-centric model of corporate law and governance. This includes de jure rules relating to derivative enforcement. Despite convergence of the UK system towards the US model, each system continues to diverge as regards levels of...