Corporation Law and the Shift toward Open Access in the Antebellum United States
Corporation Law and the Shift toward Open Access in the Antebellum United States
This chapter analyses the general incorporation statutes for manufacturing firms adopted by the American states until 1860. Prior to the enactment of a general law, a business could only incorporate by obtaining a special act of its state legislature; general statutes facilitated incorporation through a routine administrative procedure. A new chronology of the adoption of these statutes reveals that several states enacted them much earlier than previous scholarship indicates. Analysis of these laws reveals that many imposed strict regulations on the corporations they created, whereas others granted entrepreneurs near-total freedom. Many Southern states enacted particularly liberal statutes, but sometimes also prohibited nonwhites from incorporating businesses or gave a government official discretion over access to the law. An analysis of the volume of incorporation through special charters shows that the states that failed to adopt general incorporation laws tended to offer unusually generous access to incorporation through special legislative acts. These results imply that the adoption of a general incorporation statute did not always represent a discrete transition to open access to the corporate form. Instead, general statutes sometimes included highly restrictive provisions governing access, and some states generously accommodated demands for incorporation in the absence of a general statute.
Keywords: corporation, corporate governance, institutions, corporation law, public choice, open access, general incorporation
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
