Talk:Corporate law/Archive 1

Archive 1

International views and article title

The title should be Company (Co.), I believe

The apparent inaccuracies aside, this page seems to be redundant, duplicating what is better covered under "Corporation." I think it should be deleted and the title redirected to "corporation." Johnwhunt 15:59, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree, this should definitely be merged with Corporation. -- PullUpYourSocks 04:20, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Please do not move or merge this article! Under English law, a company is quite distinct from a corporation, and this is primarily a legal article. Why don't we try and keep legal information about what a company actually is (in terms of legal definition) here, and what it actually does at "corporation", where there will be a stronger overlap? --VivaEmilyDavies 21:08, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Could you provide a definitive and factual comparison/definition of the two (company and corporation) under English law? Then the articles can be rewriitne with more accuracy. Johnwhunt 19:22, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, I added the merge notice, but now that I think about it a bit more, there is a difference. For example a Limited liability company is not a corporation, but is a legal entity. These articles both need to be very clear about the differences, and the fact that there aren't many as far as I know. I'll see if I can't research the differences, but I'm not sure I'll understand everything I find. - Taxman 16:32, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

Concur with a merger in this case. As it currently stands, the article contains redundant content which can plainly be incorporated within the far more extensive corporation article. English speakers from Commonwealth countries have simply lost out in developing a decent corporate entity article with the title "company". 203.198.237.30 08:31, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

I have done a fairly substantial rewrite of this article. I have tried to keep it "international" but it has a slightly English/Australian/NZ flavour to it just because that is my background. I have tried to avoid too much legal detail, but I have footnoted where appropriate. Personally, I am against merging it with "corporation" because, (i) they are different types of entity even if they have similar concepts (in England though, they are quite different as corporations aggregate and corporations sole), and (ii) if you consolidate those two, how much further do you go? Joint stock company, private limited company, company limited by guarantee, corporation, company, public limited company ... the list for consolidation just goes on and on. Just my POV, but one or two global articles which reach out to smaller articles, and which cross refer back is a more productive way to go. Legis 17:23, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Moreover, a "corporation" includes other bodies - government bodies, and trust corporations in common law jurisdictions. A company is a specific type of corporation. I would not merge, though thought should go into what material goes where to avoid unneccessary duplication. Arthur Markham 19:39, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I think there is a difference in etymology. In the U.S., "company" and "corporation" are synonymous. In much of the rest of the world, "company" is a subset (although clearly the most important subset) of the wider class of "corporations", as Arthur points out. For those reasons I think it is now generally accepted that two separate articles are appropriate. It has also lead to this article having a very "non-U.S." slant to it. Legis 09:59, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the term "company" and "corporation" do not have a similar meaning in U.S. law. If a business entity is incorporated, it generally includes "corporation" or incorporated" (Inc.) as part of its legal name. Only corporations may issue stock. Any sole proprietorship can run their business (DBA - doing buisiness as) as AnyNameHere Company. Even LLCs (limited liability companies) differ in that they have no shareholders and no stock. Zenithian 22:52, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Facilitating interwiki links, establishing taxonomy

I'm trying to establish meaningful wikilinks in the business area, particularly between the sv, de and en wikipedias, and to some extent the da, nn and no ones.

Company, the way I understand it, signifies any legal entity existing for business purposes (as opposed to i.e. foundations or voluntary associations. I believe the article Types of companies support this view. Company is thus a good translation for de:Unternehmen/sv:företag. When it comes to company types, however, I think some general and specific terms are lacking. I'm not quite sure if Corporation is a general term or specific, or both. It seems to include a range of different company forms in Sweden and Germany, while at the same time incorporating features that are not present in all those forms.

Of course sv:aktiebolag could be interwikied as aktiebolag, but that sort of misses the point, because then de:Aktiengesellschaft would be interwikied as Aktiengesellschaft and then it makes no sense to link the Swedish and German term to each other, which I consider a missed opportunity, since the company forms are as good as identical.

I would like to be able to link sv:aktiebolag/de:Aktiegesellschaft/es:Sociedades_anónimas/something_english. Some are now linked to Corporation, which as stated above doesn't feel right, and some are linked to Joint-stock company, but this article is lacking -- it's unclear of the JSC is a legal entity, and it seems to actually be a current company form in Texas, not just a general concept. I thought Limited liability company seemed a good term, but that's linked to de:GmbH, which is yet another similar, but slightly different, concept.

Limited company seems to be a good term for these kinds of companies, except that the article describes a certain category of UK companies, which don't necessarily include the use of stocks.

In summary: Is there a good name for an article describing companies owned by stock featuring limited liability for the stock owners? If so, there should probably be a joint article for this concept and a category with the same name, where articles such as the above named ones and some other ones would be included.

Help? ;-) clacke 13:54, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Have you had a look at Types of companies? Ewlyahoocom 19:01, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I did. Sorry if my long rant confused things, I just had to get it out of my system. ;-)

Looking at Types of companies there seems to be an almost-consensus that the term I'm looking for is stock company or stock corporation, of which I feel the former is the more generic one. Does it seem like a good idea to create the category and article Stock company and move the generic parts of the other articles on the theme (AG, AB, JSC etc.) to that article, while adding the remaining (parts of) the articles to the category? clacke 21:31, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I think you could go either of 2 ways:

1. Make a detailed page for each type of entity as described in the law. But this will be be a lot of pages because there's so many variations from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, this is covered at the state level in the United States; or
2. Find a page that already covers most of what you need and add a section that highlights the difference(s) of the type that's missing.

(Just to disclose my bias, I think it's silly to try and cover legal minutiae in Wikipedia.) Ewlyahoocom 21:54, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

References

I have taken off the "unreferenced" tag. This Article is heavily footnoted, and I think the tag is a hangover from prior to the amendment and restatement. Legis 08:34, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Wrong emphasis?

Am I alone in thinking that the paragraph ordering may be mis-aligned? Having one very short para on the U.S. (first, of course) and then one other paragraph containing the vast volume of the information relating to the rest of the English speaking world relegated to second, but equal, with all the other information relegated to sub-para status seems to me to be the wrong way to do it. Thoughts? --Legis (talk - contributions) 11:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep. I agree. So, hopefully this won't be seen as too drastic, I'm moving the whole article to the new page name "Company law". This name currently redirects to "Corporations law". Company law in the singular ought to refer to ltd companies, plc's, pty ltd's in Australia, Inc's in the States, companies limited by guarantee, etc. Companies law of course, in the plural, refers to partnerships and so on in addition to ordinary companies. Then I'm reordering the section names and introducing the etymology section. Wikidea 10:28, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

From Corporations law page

I posted this on the other page, just a moment ago:

The connection with other pages

There are pages on:

1. Companies law 2. Corporate law 3. Business organizations 4. Incorporation (business) 5. Corporation

...just for a start. Now the main problem is the terminology, which isn't entirely shared between the States on the one hand and England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, S. Africa, India, etc on the other hand. In the latter I think it's right to say that when we talk about "companies law" then that includes partnerships, etc - i.e. unincorporated companies, without separate legal personality and limited liability. Whereas in the States, obviously, corporations law is only about the companies which are "incorporated". Really, there ought to be two main pages, one on companies generally, one on the specific kind of company that everyone knows about, the ltd, the plc, the Inc, the pty ltd. In that list above, it seems to me that 4 and 5 ought to be merged, because they're already the same thing; and then 3 and 1 should cover the same subject matter (i.e. the wider scope of companies law). )2 4 and 5 are dealing with the same thing really, although 2 can focus more on law, while 4 and 5 can bring in all the sociological stuff that seems popular at the moment, criticisms etc). But what I am wondering is maybe this page, which is still rather stubbish (although has good content for the bits it covers) ought to be renamed Companies law, because you can't begin to talk partnerships when you refer to corporations, for instance. The current content then could be broadened into a wider discussion on all companies or moved into the Company law page. Hope that isn't all too complicated to follow! Please leave your thoughts. Wikidea 11:05, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Or, having more of a think, perhaps Corporations law could be a page for the big type, and then companies law, for the whole spectrum of firms? Wikidea 11:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Opening Sentence

Corporate law (also "company" or "corporations" law) is the law of the most dominant kind of business enterprise in the modern world.

This seems to be entirely gratuitous. If removed, the opening sentence would be:

Corporate law is the study of how shareholders, directors, employees, creditors, and other stakeholders such as consumers, the community and the environment interact with one another under the internal rules of the firm.

That strikes me as a much better opening sentence for the article.--Tedd (talk) 15:11, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Image

The current image for the corporate law template is File:Scale of justice 2.svg ; perhaps that a new image can be made called File:Corporate_law_icon.svg, combining Mcol_money_bag.svg with the scales of justice (since its not about law itself, but rather about the law ~in respect to companies. 91.182.68.164 (talk) 09:27, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

UK-centric?

In the United states, the term "corporate law" and "corporate lawyers" refer not to a body of laws, but to the practice of law in the service of business transactions, corporate governance (again meaning business rather than corporations specifically), business finance, securities, employment practices, and such. This is a well-written article as it now stands and I don't think it would be helped by working in this second subject. Perhaps a disambiguation link? - Wikidemon (talk) 19:08, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Definition

"is the study of how shareholders, directors, employees, creditors, and other stakeholders such as consumers, the community and the environment interact with one another" — isn't that a way too much? I don't see any way how consumers may have to do with corporate law, which is all about either managing the company by its organs, or having a stake in the company. --eugrus (talk) 10:11, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Jenks24 (talk) 11:43, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

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Corporate law → Business corporation – This page is not about corporate law, it is about corporations (in the US sense of the term). It is about commercial enterprises. The content naturally refers to law but the topic is corporations. In the same way, article's on Contract and Tort are about those topics and not Contract law and Tort law which if they existed as article would be forks and in fact are redirects.

As it happens the article corporation covers a much wider sense of corporation which includes state and non-governmental organisations with legal personality. This article is about for-profit, business corporations so I renamed it "Business corporation". This was the stable version for the last ten months If anyone thinks they have a better title I'd be glad to consider it. Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 13:54, 25 July 2014 (UTC) — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 11:27, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose, change split of content instead. Corporate law needs a lead article, and until 9 months ago this page had been stable at that name, since 2007 when it was moved from the UK-centric name Company law. For-profit/commercial corporations do not need a separate page about the law that governs them, as most company law (in the UK at any rate) applies equally to non-profit limited companies. The rather small and inadequate page Companies law should be merged into Corporate law and Commercial law; see also Types of business entity. There is no need for a page about "business corporation", which would duplicate the proper content of "corporation"; renaming and repurposing this page with that name would make a bad situation worse as a WP:Content fork from that topic. Blue-Haired Lawyer acted because he identified a problem with the content not matching the name,[1] but if any content in this article does not belong under the topic of corporate law, a better course of action will be to move that content to other pages, or remove any that is just duplication. – Fayenatic London 18:19, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose per Fayenatic. Instead split into corporate law and incorporated company -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 05:14, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

I think you'll probably find that the law governing Vodafone plc is quite different from that governing Westminster City Council, although both are obviously corporations. While this article's current lead sound quite good, the content of the article has little to do with the study of "how shareholders, directors, employees, creditors, and other stakeholders such as consumers, the community and the environment interact with one another", rather it is about the forms of registered companies. — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 16:52, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Reverting and the Formation of the Act section

@HUMMERTON beach, Corsschekcboogie, Thomas.W, 188.29.218.27, CAPTAIN RAJU, Bongwarrior, and Bichbarbar:

Recently, there has been a lot of reverting going on (see here), removing and re-adding the Formation of the Act section (starts The Act was first introduced to Parliament as the Consumer Credit Bill at the beginning of November 1970, and initially ran to 298 pages. It was given its second reading on 14 November...), this section does deal with corporate law in the UK, but because there has been a lot of reverting going on, I didn't want to re-add it (it is currently not in the article).

I thought it would be best - before we more permanently add or remove the section - to reach consensus on whether it would be good to have the section in the article. Some of the reasons for reverting are: how is that even relevant here????????????, Poppycock, You aint no admin sunshine, Rv removal of sourced content, a direct continuation of behaviu they were blocked for yesterday.. I have {{ping}}ed the users involved in the reverting. The section mentioned can be found here (bottom of the diff on the left). Thanks.  Seagull123  Φ  16:42, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

@Seagull123: Of the ones you pinged everyone but me, Bongwarrior and CAPTAIN RAJU have been blocked as vandals, so you won't get many replies. It doesn't belong in the article, though, as you might see if you read it carefully. It's nonsense added by HUMMERTON beach, an editor who has been confirmed by a checkuser as being the same person as Corsschecboogie and Bichbarbar. Which is why I didn't readd it when Bichbarbar was being taken care of. Thomas.W ^talk 16:50, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

OK, thanks for that @Thomas.W: with all the reverting I didn't know what the consensus was. Thanks.  Seagull123  Φ  17:05, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. I hadn't noticed that either. --Bongwarrior (talk) 18:49, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Corporate law, business associations law and commercial law

There seems to be a cross-jurisdictional disagreement as to whether corporate law (or business association law) is a part of commercial law, but it seems clear that corporate law is a significantly more narrow category. I've removed language from this article that seemed to fundamentally confuse corporate law with commercial law by including things like "trade law" and references to the UCC, which are clearly not part of corporate law.

There is still a redirect from "commercial law" to "corporate law", which seems entirely inappropriate, but "commercial law" should point to something. There is a good, if UK-centric outline of commercial law which covers the sort of topics one would expect in a broad discussion of commercial law.

There is no article discussing of business associations generally, and at present this article dips its toes into a number of areas that are really about "business associations" and not "corporations". Should this article either become strictly about corporations, or should it be renamed and fully embrace the full gamut of the law of business associations? (I favor the latter, but would like someone with more experience with Wikipedia to weigh in.) Salguod (talk) 17:15, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

We should rename outline of commercial law to commercial law just do it don't hesitate, by the way corporations are business associations.

We need an expert!

Vorpzn (talk) 03:40, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

major rewrite necessary

This article is a complete mess and is in need of an expert or at least someone with a minimum of understanding of the topic. It defines its subject as a certain body of law and as the study of it and as part of what it calls "companies law", which is probably not even grammatically correct and would or should have an article of its own if corporate law were indeed "a part of a broader companies law" (sic). In fact, "companies law" is a redirect to itself, and the article is also a redirect from "corporations law".

The article also has other links to itself, which indicates more confusion in its scope and content, perhaps due to incorrect mergers or moves:

The most prominent kind of company, usually referred to as a "corporation", is a "juristic person", i.e. it has separate legal personality, and those who invest money into the business have limited liability for any losses the company makes, governed by corporate law. --Espoo (talk) 15:26, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tiani496.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:00, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Accounting

why are shareholders given the responsibility to appoint directors 41.114.183.245 (talk) 13:54, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

Corporate regulation

What' you mean by corporate regulation 2409:4071:E16:8AE8:4ABE:8D65:857:93B4 (talk) 17:15, 21 April 2022 (UTC)