The Legal Nature of Corporations

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tions known to the law, government and property. But if we understand government in a wider sense, it must be incident to corporate property relations, and on the other hand corporate government is apt to produce corporate property. For the undivided control of joint rights requires that each associate...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tions known to the law, government and property. But if we understand government in a wider sense, it must be incident to corporate property relations, and on the other hand corporate government is apt to produce corporate property. For the undivided control of joint rights requires that each associate should be subjected to some restraint in the interest of common action, and his participation in the joint control is conditioned upon his submission to such restraint; to this extent every corporation must enjoy some powers of government over its members, however rarely they may be called into play. Conversely the exercise of governmental rights by a body of persons will as a rule result in the possession of some property, if it be only the records of proceedings, the necessary apparatus and fixtures for the holding of meetings, or the ownership of fees or other contributions. That incidental property rights may assume vast proportions is sufficiently demonstrated by the example of the state and of large cities. The technical conception of a corporation has grown up in connection with property and not with governmental rights. The problem of corporate existence is substantially the same whether we regard it from the point of view of government or of property, but the difficulties that have made themselves felt, and the theories that have been presented for their solution, have arisen chiefly with regard to property relations and their incidents of personal capacity. In this essay the corporation will therefore be treated primarily as a property-holding body. 4. The Doctrine and Its Difficulties.?The legal recognition of institutions and bodies of persons as distinctive holders of rights under a collective name constitutes a definite doctrine, accepted by the courts, the leg...