The company is a brilliant legal invention. Lawyers, alas, are not always so inventive. It is especially rare that they conceive of something metaphysical. Yet that, undoubtedly, is what a company is. It is a legal person that is distinct from, and greater than, the shareholders, officers and employees who give the company daily life. The author describes the way in which this invention, so important for modern society, was adapted from medieval predecessors in England and France. Little could those who gave birth to this legal fiction have imagined the dominance that companies would come to enjoy in the national economy, in global markets and world power.
Not only was the company brilliant in its conception. Its success can be attributed to the ongoing endeavour to expand and adapt the initial idea to a world of remarkable changes to which the company itself has contributed. This book is the story of the origins and history of company law; of the adoption in Australia of comprehensive legal regulations to ensure the integrity of corporate governance; the meandering path by which Australia moved to national control of companies and the consequential regulations of corporate finance, the securities market and the charge of company administration where, as inevitably happened from time to time, the company failed with large consequences for shareholders, directors, employees and creditors. The book finishes with a review of the law on non-profit associations which nowadays assume, in some respects, features of corporate regulation, in recognition of the growing part that such associations play in the success of any nation's civil society.