ABSTRACT

This article analyses the separate legal personality of partnerships, drawing on Hansmann and Kraakman's identification of the attributes shared by businesses possessing legal personality. Their work provides a jurisdictionally-neutral standard of comparison applied here to the Scottish partnership which, unusually amongst jurisdictions influenced by the common law tradition, possesses separate legal personality. The historical development of Scottish partnerships is explored, from its origins as a Roman-inspired type of societas, a contract centred on the rights and duties of the partners inter se, towards a modern, business able to contract with third parties in its own name. Scots law supports Hansmann and Kraakman's view that attributes of legal personality are secured by organisational law rather than contract law. Disagreeing with them, however, the author uses the Scottish experience to illustrate that lack of perpetual succession is not, as they argue, a ‘mere inconvenience which can easily overcome with contractual workarounds’, but rather an essential requirement of a workable partnership with legal personality.

摘要

本文利用汉斯曼和克拉克曼对具有法人资格的企业共有属性的识别，分析了合伙企业的独立法人资格。他们的工作为苏格兰合伙制企业提供了一种与司法管辖区无关的比较标准，在普通法传统影响下的各个辖区中，苏格兰合伙制具有不同的法人资格。探索了苏格兰合作伙伴关系的历史发展，从其起源于罗马风格的社会形式，即以合作伙伴之间的权利和义务为中心的合同，致力于以自己的名义与第三方签约的现代企业。苏格兰法律支持汉斯曼和克拉克曼的观点，即法人资格的属性由组织法而不是合同法保护。然而，与他们不同意的是，作者利用苏格兰的经验来说明，如他们所言，永续继承的缺乏不是“仅仅是不便，可以通过合同变通办法轻松克服”，而是与法律建立有效合作伙伴关系的基本要求。个性。