Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe

Jhering, Rudolf von

Rudolf von Jhering (1818–1892) was Professor in Roman and Private Law since 1845 and one of the most important German jurists of the nineteenth century. His very rich literary production lasted 50 years. In such a huge period of activity, Jhering’s legal perspective and method changed. Thus his jurisprudence is usually divided into two periods: The first one is considered as the formalist, constructivist, and systematic phase (from 1842 to 1871) and the second period (from 1872 to 1892) represents the realist, teleological, and proto-sociological phase of his production. The passage to the second stage took a transition period from 1859 to 1871, when Jhering expressed a kind of dissatisfaction for a purely formal study of law, which was mainly based on systematic and formalist thinking and scarcely involved with the “substantial element of the law.

XLVII.—On some new siliceous sponges collected by M. Pechu\uebl-L\uf6sche in the Congo

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