IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/16974_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The corporation is not a nexus of contracts: it’s an iPhone

In: Institutions and Evolution of Capitalism

Author

Listed:
  • Richard N. Langlois

Abstract

The fact that the corporation cannot be constructed solely out of voluntary contract narrowly understood is compatible with the claim that the corporation is ultimately nothing but a form of cooperation among rights-holding individuals. The chapter defends this bottom-up position by shifting attention from contracts to rights, and specifically to the distinction between rights in personam, which are created by contract, and rights in rem, which underpin property and are created by law. Like property, the corporate entity is an architectural component of abstract law, as opposed to a concession of the state. Corporations are effectively mechanisms through which owners exercise their rights, with the implication that corporations do not have any rights of their own. The fact that owners retain residual control rights over assets shows that entity shielding achieved by corporate law does not diminish its owners’ rights in rem.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard N. Langlois, 2019. "The corporation is not a nexus of contracts: it’s an iPhone," Chapters, in: Francesca Gagliardi & David Gindis (ed.), Institutions and Evolution of Capitalism, chapter 10, pages 142-156, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:16974_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781785364990/9781785364990.00019.xml
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Angela Ambrosino & Paolo Silvestri, 2020. "Hodgson: An Institution Across Disciplinary Barriers," Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino (Italy), vol. 54(2), pages 329-348, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics and Finance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:16974_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Darrel McCalla (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.e-elgar.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.