The City of Glasgow Bank’s collapse in 1878 was the largest bank failure of its time. The causes of the crash and its impact on joint-stock banking and the Scottish and British economy have been well-studied, but how its liquidation was concluded remains under-explored. At the same time, the legal and commercial milieu of nineteenth-century Britain spawned a new type of commercial entity—the investment trust. At the intersection of these two historical moments lies the Assets Company Ltd, which is both the legal device that finally concluded the liquidation of the City of Glasgow Bank and a fascinating case study of an early investment trust. Employing little-used archival sources—primarily the Assets Company’s records kept by the Board of Trade and published court judgments—this article investigates the significance and legacy of the Assets Company, from its incorporation in 1882 to its winding-up in 1956. Beyond merely concluding the legal process of liquidation, the Assets Company would go on to manage and profit from the recovery of the City of Glasgow Bank’s assets as well as conduct its own investment activities well into the twentieth century. This article concludes that the Assets Company provides a noteworthy example of how the Bank’s shareholders responded to the winding-up of a large failed bank, particularly, one with unlimited liability, and how an investment trust can be used to maximise the proceeds of liquidation. The winding-up of the City of Glasgow Bank was thus unique relative to previous bank failures in how its shareholders were able to avoid the prolonged liquidation experienced by other Scottish banks. Finally, the Assets Company is an interesting case study of the diversity of the early investment trust industry, and a company that would go on to inspire numerous successor enterprises.
1878年格拉斯哥城银行(City of Glasgow Bank)的倒闭是当时规模最大的银行倒闭事件。这场危机的起因及其对股份制银行、苏格兰和英国经济的影响已经得到了充分的研究，但其清算是如何结束的仍未得到充分探讨。与此同时，19世纪英国的法律和商业环境催生了一种新型的商业实体——投资信托。这两个历史时刻的交汇点是资产有限公司(Assets Company Ltd)，它既是最终结束格拉斯哥城市银行(City of Glasgow Bank)清算的法律工具，也是早期投资信托的迷人案例研究。本文利用很少使用的档案资料——主要是由贸易委员会保存的资产公司记录和已公布的法院判决——调查了资产公司从1882年成立到1956年清盘的重要性和遗产。除了完成清算的法律程序之外，资产公司还将继续管理格拉斯哥城市银行的资产并从中获利，并在20世纪进行自己的投资活动。本文的结论是，资产公司提供了一个值得注意的例子，说明银行股东如何应对一家大型破产银行的清盘，特别是一家拥有无限责任的银行，以及如何利用投资信托来最大化清算收益。因此，相对于以往的银行倒闭，格拉斯哥城市银行的清盘是独一无二的，因为它的股东能够避免其他苏格兰银行经历的长期清算。最后，资产公司是早期投资信托行业多样性的一个有趣案例，也是一个将继续激励众多后继企业的公司。
{"title":"Capturing Profit from Disaster: The Assets Company Ltd and the Afterlife of the City of Glasgow Bank","authors":"Seán O’Reilly","doi":"10.1093/AJLH/NJAA021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/AJLH/NJAA021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The City of Glasgow Bank’s collapse in 1878 was the largest bank failure of its time. The causes of the crash and its impact on joint-stock banking and the Scottish and British economy have been well-studied, but how its liquidation was concluded remains under-explored. At the same time, the legal and commercial milieu of nineteenth-century Britain spawned a new type of commercial entity—the investment trust. At the intersection of these two historical moments lies the Assets Company Ltd, which is both the legal device that finally concluded the liquidation of the City of Glasgow Bank and a fascinating case study of an early investment trust. Employing little-used archival sources—primarily the Assets Company’s records kept by the Board of Trade and published court judgments—this article investigates the significance and legacy of the Assets Company, from its incorporation in 1882 to its winding-up in 1956. Beyond merely concluding the legal process of liquidation, the Assets Company would go on to manage and profit from the recovery of the City of Glasgow Bank’s assets as well as conduct its own investment activities well into the twentieth century. This article concludes that the Assets Company provides a noteworthy example of how the Bank’s shareholders responded to the winding-up of a large failed bank, particularly, one with unlimited liability, and how an investment trust can be used to maximise the proceeds of liquidation. The winding-up of the City of Glasgow Bank was thus unique relative to previous bank failures in how its shareholders were able to avoid the prolonged liquidation experienced by other Scottish banks. Finally, the Assets Company is an interesting case study of the diversity of the early investment trust industry, and a company that would go on to inspire numerous successor enterprises.","PeriodicalId":54164,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY","volume":" 16","pages":"450-484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72383937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Swedish students commonly studied abroad, especially during the seventeenth century. This was true also for those studying law. This article examines the legal dissertations that Swedish students defended during their visits to foreign universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The universities of Greifswald and Leiden produced the most dissertations with Swedish respondents. After discussing the practice of written dissertations and Swedes as respondents more generally, the dissertations of some Swedish students are examined in more detail. This analysis showed that many Swedes probably wrote the dissertations themselves, or at least actively participated, as references to Swedish law were common. By reflecting these dissertations with developments in early modern Sweden, the article provides new insight into the educational level of the slowly emerging Swedish legal profession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows how dissertations defended abroad were a good way to highlight one’s expertise in a country like Sweden, which was still in dire need of legal professionals.
{"title":"From Disputation Hall to High Office: Swedish Students’ Legal Dissertations at German and Dutch Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries","authors":"Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen","doi":"10.1093/AJLH/NJAA024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/AJLH/NJAA024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Swedish students commonly studied abroad, especially during the seventeenth century. This was true also for those studying law. This article examines the legal dissertations that Swedish students defended during their visits to foreign universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The universities of Greifswald and Leiden produced the most dissertations with Swedish respondents. After discussing the practice of written dissertations and Swedes as respondents more generally, the dissertations of some Swedish students are examined in more detail. This analysis showed that many Swedes probably wrote the dissertations themselves, or at least actively participated, as references to Swedish law were common. By reflecting these dissertations with developments in early modern Sweden, the article provides new insight into the educational level of the slowly emerging Swedish legal profession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows how dissertations defended abroad were a good way to highlight one’s expertise in a country like Sweden, which was still in dire need of legal professionals.","PeriodicalId":54164,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY","volume":"22 1","pages":"536-563"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82682488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article revisits the debates over family law reform in the years surrounding the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule. It builds upon social historical studies of marriage and child-rearing, and puts these into dialogue with the scholarship on legal pluralism, in order to examine the postcolonial implications of gendered legal struggles over social reproduction that arose during the colonial era. Drawing on key court cases, the report of a commission of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and the papers of a voluntary association, the article explores how different groups of women established their authority to speak on these issues, and why they were able to legitimate some reforms but not others. Whilst historians have pointed to the constraints that single-party socialism imposed on feminist mobilization in Ghana, this article explores further the ‘form, scale and scope’ of women’s agency. In the context of republican attempts to tackle colonial legacies of ‘deep legal pluralism’, and a programme of socialist development, women reformers framed their arguments in terms of a balance between the preservation of ‘custom’ and ‘advancement’ to modernity, and claimed their authority as mothers. By working creatively with the contradictions arising between legal, political, and sociological discourses, women parliamentarians secured a child maintenance law in 1965, even though earlier attempts to reform the marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had ended in failure.
{"title":"Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana: Revisiting the Struggle for Family Law Reform","authors":"K. Skinner","doi":"10.1093/AJLH/NJAA015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/AJLH/NJAA015","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article revisits the debates over family law reform in the years surrounding the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule. It builds upon social historical studies of marriage and child-rearing, and puts these into dialogue with the scholarship on legal pluralism, in order to examine the postcolonial implications of gendered legal struggles over social reproduction that arose during the colonial era. Drawing on key court cases, the report of a commission of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and the papers of a voluntary association, the article explores how different groups of women established their authority to speak on these issues, and why they were able to legitimate some reforms but not others. Whilst historians have pointed to the constraints that single-party socialism imposed on feminist mobilization in Ghana, this article explores further the ‘form, scale and scope’ of women’s agency. In the context of republican attempts to tackle colonial legacies of ‘deep legal pluralism’, and a programme of socialist development, women reformers framed their arguments in terms of a balance between the preservation of ‘custom’ and ‘advancement’ to modernity, and claimed their authority as mothers. By working creatively with the contradictions arising between legal, political, and sociological discourses, women parliamentarians secured a child maintenance law in 1965, even though earlier attempts to reform the marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had ended in failure.","PeriodicalId":54164,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY","volume":"399 1","pages":"357-387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80496627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the role of Arthur Garfield Hays and mostly Jewish lawyers in dismantling the American Bar Association’s prohibition of African Americans becoming members. By publicly resigning from the organization and encouraging others to do so over the ABA’s treatment of African-American applicant Francis Rivers, these lawyers made the color bar a public issue in the press. While earlier efforts in the late 1930s had failed, World War II contributed to the success of the activists’ campaign in the early 1940s, as the struggle against Nazi racism had begun to undercut American racial practices. In August 1943 the ABA changed its procedures governing admission that had previously functioned to exclude African-Americans. Other legal professional organizations soon followed its example. Thus the legal profession refashioned itself into part of the liberal order emerging in the wake of World War II.
{"title":"Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943","authors":"R. Hamm","doi":"10.1093/ajlh/njaa011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/njaa011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the role of Arthur Garfield Hays and mostly Jewish lawyers in dismantling the American Bar Association’s prohibition of African Americans becoming members. By publicly resigning from the organization and encouraging others to do so over the ABA’s treatment of African-American applicant Francis Rivers, these lawyers made the color bar a public issue in the press. While earlier efforts in the late 1930s had failed, World War II contributed to the success of the activists’ campaign in the early 1940s, as the struggle against Nazi racism had begun to undercut American racial practices. In August 1943 the ABA changed its procedures governing admission that had previously functioned to exclude African-Americans. Other legal professional organizations soon followed its example. Thus the legal profession refashioned itself into part of the liberal order emerging in the wake of World War II.","PeriodicalId":54164,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87717928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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