A Treatise on the Law of Corporations.

first edition uncut in the original boards

The first edition of this seminal work on English company law. Uncut in the original boards.

This is the first modern textbook to systematically compile the various legislative and common law rulings, which hitherto lay scattered across multifarious reports, into one coherent treatise on the Law of Corporation.

The work is divided into five chapters which deal in turn with the creation of corporations, their relation to the public, how they are organised internally, visitation, and their dissolution. A lengthy introduction provides 'a definition and description of a corporation, the distribution of corporations into their different kinds, and the manner in which a corporation is composed' (vol. 1, p.v). Each volume is prefaced with a table of the principal cases cited, and ends with a comprehensive index.

The author, Stewart Kyd (1758-1811), was educated at King's College, Aberdeen before being admitted to Middle Temple in June 1782 and called to the bar in June 1787. Influenced by French revolutionary ideas, he became a friend to the radical politicians Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, to whom the present work is dedicated.

In November 1792 Kyd joined the Society for Constitutional Information, a radical organisation founded by Major John Cartwright in 1780 which pushed for constitutional reform, and notably promoted Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. The Society was suppressed in 1794 when Kyd, along with Hardy and Tooke and other radicals, was arrested for High Treason and committed to the Tower of London, where the second volume of this treatise was completed, with the dedication dated from the 'Tower, August 20, 1794'.

'On 25 October all were brought up for trial before a special commission at the Old Bailey, but after the acquittal of Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall, the attorney-general declined offering any evidence against Kyd, and he was discharged' (ODNB). Kyd would go on to defend Thomas Williams, the bookseller indicted for blasphemy for publishing Paine's Age of Reason, in June 1797

A 'very complete and learned work on the law of Corporations... a remarkably able pioneer treatise on this subject' (Holdsworth, A History of English Law).

First edition; 2 vols; 8vo (22.5 x 14.5 cm); half-titles, vol. 1 bound without printed dedication,contemporary ownership inscription to front free endpaper recto of each vol., library stamps to covers, titles, half-titles, verso of final f. of text of vols, ad occasional within textblock, old bookseller's ticket to front pastedowns, occasional light spotting; original brown-paper backed blue-paper boards, printed title label to spine of each vol., MS library shelfmark labels, covers with library stamps, joints split but holding, edges uncut, a well-preserved examples; xx, 455, [21]; [4], xxiii, [1], 516, [12]pp.

ESTC T68913 & T68914.