Keywords
company
enterprise
ownership
control
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Copyright (c) 2026 Derecho Público Iberoamericano
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Abstract
This academic paper examines the corporation from a comparative legal perspective, starting from a fundamental terminological distinction among the concepts of “corporation”, “company” and “enterprise”, whose conflation creates difficulties when comparing institutions across different legal traditions. Following the functional framework proposed by Reiner Kraakman and co-authors, the paper identifies the common core shared by every corporation: legal personality, limited liability, transferable shares, de legated management, and investor ownership. It then traces the historical trajectory of the corporate form, from its medieval antecedents in guilds and municipalities, through the chartered trading companies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the modern corporation described by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, with its well-known separation of ownership and control.
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