In the spirit of weber 231 foundly obtuse and procedurally labyrinthine. For example, until 1890 the law of partnership was characterised by the absence of a universally accepted definition of a partnership; and thus, a variety of sometimes contradictory tests were applied to establish the existence of a partnership. For creditors, anxious to knowto whomthey could look for the firm’s debts., the problemwas grave. The creditors’ lot was compounded by the archaic rules which surrounded proceedings against a partnership, especially those concerning the correct parties to an action. Moreover, until 1916 there was no system of registration of partnerships and no requirements as to publicity. It could be extremely difficult, therefore, to know who were the partners of a particular partnership. As regards companies, the Bubble Act of 1720 had formerly made it difficult to secure the attributes of separate personality and limited liability: i.e., the vast bulk of business organisations were legally required to adopt the form of an unincorporated association, such as a partnership. Attempts to circumvent the obtuse provisions of the Bubble Act added fuel to the uncertainties which characterised this area of the law. When the liberalisation of English company law occurred, gradually over the period 1825 to 1862, limited liability and/or general incorporation were already available in New York, Ireland, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Scotland. Not only was liberalisation belated relative to England’s Industrial Revolution and the laws of England’s trade rivals; no enormous rush to incorporate followed the general availability of incorporation and limited liability by registration. The bulk of British trade and industry continued as previously despite the intricacy and uncertainty surrounding the law governing unincorporated associations. Only very late in the nineteenth century did the corporate form supplant the partnership as the dominant form of business organisation. The first article to appear in the first issue of the Law Quarterly Review in 1884, was a critique by Stephen and Pollock of section seventeen of the Statute of Frauds.-“’5 Now Stephen and Pollock were hardly firebrands. Yet they detailed what they called some of “the radical defects of English law”.5^ They asserted that many fundamental commercial terms such as “contract for the sale of goods”, “goods”, “note or memorandumin writing” and “signed” were obscure and lacked authoritative definition. Sec, generally, A. D. DuBois, The English Business Company after the Bubble Act: 1720-1800. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938); B. C. Hunt, The Development of the Business Corporation in England. 1800-1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936); L. Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economv, 2nd ed., (London: Methuen, 1983); D. Landes, “The Structure of Enterprise in the Nineteenth Century: the Cases Of Britain and Germany”, in D. Landes, (ed.). The Rise of Capitalism, (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 99-111. J. Stephen and L. Pollock, “Section Seventeen of the Statute of Frauds”, Law Quarterly Review. 1, 1885, pp. 1-24. Ibid. p. 7.
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