Juridical ontology and the theory of the firm

Simon Deakin

Chapter 9 in Institutions and Evolution of Capitalism, 2019, pp 127-141 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The study of the patterns of legal thought can reveal aspects of economic institutions that are otherwise hard to grasp. The concepts lawyers use to denote the firm in corporate law or employment law, for example, disclose something about its economic nature. The chapter shows that the evolution of legal forms such as the corporation is the result of two conflicting pressures: on the one hand, to adjust the law to a changing external environment, and on the other, to maintain the internal consistency of legal thought. Hence, the gradual recognition of various forms of entity shielding and the assignment of legal personality to durable, self-governing associational arrangements was not only a historically specific development associated with the long process of industrialisation. It was also driven by law’s need to maintain internal, self-referential consistency, without which the legal system would dissolve into a mass of undifferentiated commands.

Keywords: Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781785364990/9781785364990.00018.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:16974_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().