Companies and Civil Law
See also: UK partnership law, English trust law, English contract law, English tort law, and English unjust enrichmentCompanies occupy a special place in civil law, because they have a legal personality separate from those who invest their capital and labour to run the business. The general rules of contract, tort and unjust enrichment operate in the first place against the company as a distinct entity. This differs fundamentally from other forms of business association. A sole trader acquires rights and duties as normal under the general law of obligations. If people carry on business together with a view to profit, they are deemed to have formed a partnership under the Partnership Act 1890 section 1. Like a sole trader, partners will be liable on any contract or tort obligation jointly and severally in shares equal to their monetary contribution, or according to their culpability. Law, accountancy and actuarial firms are commonly organised as partnerships. Since the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000, partners can limit the amount they are liable for to their monetary investment in the business, if the partnership owes more money than the enterprise has. Outside these professions, however, the most common method for businesses to limit their liability is by forming a company.
Read more about this topic: United Kingdom Company Law
Famous quotes containing the words companies and, companies, civil and/or law:
“Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy.”
—Sugar Rautbord, U.S. socialite fund-raiser and self-described “trash” novelist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 7, by Studs Terkel (1988)
“Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy.”
—Sugar Rautbord, U.S. socialite fund-raiser and self-described “trash” novelist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 7, by Studs Terkel (1988)
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law ... cannot be found in a rational state of society.”
—Robert Owen (1771–1858)