
Who is the owner of a corporation?
Who owns and who controls a corporation?
How can you tell who owns a corporation?
Do shareholders own the corporation?
Is a director of a corporation an owner?
Is a private company a corporation?
Who owns a corporation before shares are issued?
Overview
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All states recognize a corporation as a distinct legal entity, meaning that it operates separately from its owners. A benefit of this is that the owners of a corporation can’t be held personally liable for any business debts, which is one of the biggest advantages of operating a corporation. Whe…
Ownership and control
History
Personhood
See also
A corporation is, at least in theory, owned and controlled by its members. In a joint-stock companythe members are known as shareholders, and each of their shares in the ownership, control, and profits of the corporation is determined by the portion of shares in the company that they own. Thus a person who owns a quarter of the shares of a joint-stock company owns a quarter of the company, is entitled to a quarter of the profit (or at least a quarter of the profit given to sharehol…
Further reading
The word “corporation” derives from corpus, the Latin word for body, or a “body of people”. By the time of Justinian (reigned 527–565), Roman law recognized a range of corporate entities under the names Universitas, corpus or collegium. Following the passage of the Lex Julia during the reign of Julius Caesar as Consul and Dictator of the Roman Republic(49–44 BC), and their reaffirmation during t…
External links
Despite not being human beings, corporations have been ruled legal persons in a few countries, and have many of the same rights as natural persons do. For example, a corporation can own property, and can sue or be sued for as long as it exists. Corporations can exercise human rightsagainst real individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations. Corporations can be “dissolved” either by statutory operation, the order of the court, o…