EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The introduction of limited liability in nineteenth century England

Paolo Maggioni

No 1116, Openloc Working Papers from Public policies and local development

Abstract: In this paper I have analysed the development of company law from 1720 through to 1857. During this long period of time, company law assumed the characteristics it has now. At the starting point, company law stood with incorporation granted by the Crown or Parliament on one side and partnership regulated by common law on the other. The development of the modern corporation needed the definition of what were the problems connected to the fact that a firm is run in association and what is the legal framework that allows to solve efficiently with the lowest costs these problems. In this paper I show that the introduction of limited liability gets its meaning from the exact definition of many other aspects of company life, such as bankruptcy procedures, directors’ power and responsibility, shareholders rights, publicity regime for company acts. Accordingly it’s shown that the introduction of the limited liability regime can’t be studied in isolation and it was just the last step in a complex development process.

Keywords: Corporation; and; Securities; Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.openloc.eu/cms/storage/openloc/working_papers/2011/Maggioni2011-2.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.openloc.eu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trn:utwpol:1116

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Openloc Working Papers from Public policies and local development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Rentocchini ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:trn:utwpol:1116