Australian Journal of Legal History (2005) Vol 9

119

THE NATURE OF PARTNERSHIP IN ROMAN LAW ∗ SALVO RANDAZZO ∗∗
In Europe, as in Australia, a company is a legal body in which individual participants are not liable with their own assets for the obligations assumed by the company and vice versa. This conceptual pattern is regulated in the Codes as società per azioni or società anonima (joint-stock company – similar to a public company), and società a responsabilità limitata (limited company). However in European Civil Law there are also types of società di persone (partnership) in which there is not a juridical ‘shield’ protecting the assets of the business against a single partner’s creditors’ attacks. In these partnerships it is also the case that a partner’s private assets are exposed to the company’s creditors’ executions. Enterprise concentration in large groups, in many cases listed on the Stock Exchange and sometimes of transnational importance, occurs as a result of a preponderance of joint-stock companies. This often renders the Codes inadequate and results in continual legislative adaptation. In order to respond to this need to adapt the EU countries are helped by the unitary normative policy imposed by the European Community. What then is the position of the present European Law towards Roman tradition? We live in a period of rapid transformation to which Continental jurists are exposed, and we are witness to the so-called ‘decline of codification’. The adequacy of current European company law to the changeable economic events of the western society is at a crisis point.
∗

∗∗

I wish to thank the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society. I was particularly honoured by the invitation to open its 21st Annual Conference (12th July 2002, Katoomba, NSW). Here I am publishing the paper developed on that occasion, deliberately keeping its conversational style and adding just some guideline notes. Some small changes in the text are due to my