The distinguishing features of the partnership are the personal and unrestricted liability of each partner for the debts and obligations of the firm (whether the partner assented to their being incurred or not) and the right of each partner to participate in the management of the firm and to act as an agent of it in entering into legal transactions on its behalf. The civil-law systems of most continental European countries have additionally always permitted a modified form of partnership, the limited partnership (société en commandite, Kommanditgesellschaft, società in accomandita), in which one or more of the partners are liable for the firm’s debts only to the extent of the capital they contribute or agree to contribute. Such limited partners are prohibited from taking part in the management of the firm, however; if they do, they become personally liable without limit for the debts of the firm, together with the general partners. English common law refused to recognize the limited partnership, and in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century only Louisiana, which was governed by French civil law, permitted such partnerships. During the 19th century most of the states enacted legislation allowing limited partnerships to be formed, and in 1907 Great Britain adopted the limited partnership by statute, but it has not been much used there in practice. Another distinction between kinds of partnership in civil law—one that has no equivalent in Anglo-American common-law countries—is that between civil and commercial partnerships. This distinction depends on whether the purposes for which the partnership is formed fall within the list of commercial activities in the country’s commercial code. These codes always make manufacturing, dealing in, and transporting goods commercial activities, while professional and agricultural activities are always noncommercial. Consequently, a partnership of lawyers, doctors, or farmers is a civil partnership, governed exclusively by the civil code of the country concerned and untouched by its commercial code. No such distinction is made in the common-law countries, where professional and business partnerships are subject to the same rules as trading partnerships, although only partners in a trading partnership have the power to borrow on the firm’s behalf.
Limited-liability companies, or corporations
The company or corporation, unlike the partnership, is formed not simply by an agreement entered into between its first members; it must also be registered at a public office or court designated by law or otherwise obtain official acknowledgment of its existence. Under English and American law the company or corporation is incorporated by filing the company’s constitution (memorandum and articles of association, articles or certificate of incorporation) signed by its first members at the Companies Registry in London or, in the United States, at the office of the state secretary of state or corporation commissioner. In France, Germany, and Italy and the other countries subject to a civil-law system, a notarized copy of the constitution is filed at the local commercial tribunal, and proof is tendered that the first members of the company have subscribed the whole or a prescribed fraction of the company’s capital and that assets transferred to the company in return for an allotment of its shares have been officially valued and found to be worth at least the amount of capital allotted for them. English and American law, together with the laws of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, provide only one category of business company or corporation (in the Netherlands the naamloze vennootschap, in Sweden the aktiebolag), although all these systems of law make distinctions for tax purposes between private, or close, companies or corporations on the one hand and public companies or corporations on the other. English law also distinguishes between private and public companies for some purposes of company law; for example, a private company cannot have more than 50 members and cannot advertise subscriptions for its shares. Under the civil-law systems, however, a fundamental distinction is drawn between the public company (société anonyme, Aktiengesellschaft, società per azioni) and the private company (société à responsabilité limitée, Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung [GmbH], società a responsabilità limitata), and in Germany the two kinds of companies are governed by different enactments, as they were in France until 1966. For practical purposes, however, public and private companies function the same way in all countries. Private companies are formed when there is no need to appeal to the public to subscribe for the company’s shares or to lend money to it, and often they are little more than incorporated partnerships whose directors hold all or most of the company’s shares. Public companies are formed—or more usually created by the conversion of private companies into public ones—when the necessary capital cannot be supplied by the directors or their associates and it is necessary to raise funds from the public by publishing a prospectus. In Great Britain, the Commonwealth countries, and the United States, this also requires the obtaining of a stock exchange listing for the shares or other securities offered or an offer on the Unlisted Securities Market (USM). In a typical public company the directors hold only a small fraction of its shares, often less than 1 percent, and in Great Britain and the United States, at least, it is not uncommon for up to one-half of the funds raised by the company to be represented not by shares in the company but by loan securities such as debentures or bonds.
In Anglo-American common-law countries, public and private companies account for most of the business associations formed, and partnerships are entered into typically only for professional activities. In European countries the partnership in both its forms is still widely used for commercial undertakings. In Germany a popular form of association combines both the partnership and the company. This is the GmbH & Co. KG, which is a limited partnership whose general partner (nominally liable without limit for the partnership’s debts) is a private company and whose limited partners are the same persons as the shareholders of the company. The limited partners enjoy the benefit of limited liability for the partnership’s debts, and, by ensuring that most of the partnership’s profits are paid to them as limited partners and not to them as shareholders in the private company, they largely avoid the incidence of corporation tax.
Shares and other securities
Under all systems of law, partners may assign their share or interest in a partnership to anyone they wish unless the partnership agreement forbids this, but an assignment does not make the assignee a partner unless all the other partners agree. If they do not, the assignee is merely entitled to receive the financial benefits attached to the share or interest without being able to take part in the management of the firm, but neither is the assignee personally liable for the debts of the firm.
The shares of a company are quite different. In the first place, they are freely transferable unless the company’s constitution imposes restrictions on their transfer or, in French and Belgian law, unless the company is a private one, in which case transfers require the consent of the holders of three-quarters of the company’s issued shares. The constitution of an English private company must always restrict the transfer of its shares for the company to qualify as private. The restriction is usually that the directors may refuse to register a transfer for any of several reasons or that the other shareholders shall have the right to buy the shares at a fair price when their holder wishes to sell. In American law similar restrictions may be imposed, but unreasonable restrictions are disallowed by the courts. According to French and German law, the transfer of shares in public companies may be restricted only by being made subject to the consent of the board of directors or of the management board, but under French law, if the directors do not find an alternative purchaser at a fair price within three months, their consent is considered as given.
