FLESSIBILITÀ E RIGIDITÀ DEI TIPI SOCIETARI. SPUNTI DI COMPARAZIONE DIACRONICA DAL DIRITTO ROMANO ALL’ESPERIENZA MODERNA

Starting point of the present paper will be the various types of corporations in Roman classical law, all based on the consensual contract and diversified according to purpose and object, and it will then move on to some aspects of the structure of special for-profit corporations with regard to their internal organization, management of social activities and availability of participation in profits and losses, and their stability in the face of the occurrence of certain causes for the extinction of the social ties. This will be followed by an assessment of the problem of the legal personality of for-profit special corporations, with specific regimes for those of publicans, bankers and slave traders. I will continue immediately afterwards with the use of the corporate scheme when the partners had entrusted the conduct of business to a slave in co-ownership, appointed as institor or provided with peculium. I will end the overview of Roman law with the use of the partnership in the shipping business. Finally, I will proceed to analyze some milestones in the subsequent historical development of business corporation models through medieval and early modern commercial law, up to the codifications of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary corporate law, before advancing some summary reflections in a diachronic perspective