Re:Pandora papers: biggest leak of offshore data exposes fin...
by nindalf on Monday October 04, 2021 @02:27AM
(#28743688)
Minor quibble - there is no single Lex Julia. Any law passed by Gaius Julius Caesar or his heir Gaius Julius Caesar would be called XYZ Lex Julia to distinguish it from previous and later legislation that happened to share the same name.
Sources - Caesar, Life of a Colossus and Augustus, First Emperor of Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy.
I don’t know the definitive origin, but one of Cæsar’s reforms in the Lex Julia was to require collegia be approved by the Senate (or Emperor) to be considered a legal body. The concept of corporations traces to at least then, almost certainly earlier, since corporate personhood is a logical result of the process of creating a legal system.
The novelty of the English and Dutch trading companies wasn’t their corporate personhood, but their distributed ownership as a joint-stock company.