Underdevelopment and the Development of Law: Corporations and Corporation Law in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Means provides the first major study of both the historical development of private law in a Latin American country and the shifting role of business corporations or share companies in Latin American development. He shows that Colombia’s corporate law provisions for commercial codes held only a tenuous relationship to reality and that, even today, Colombia’s commercial development continues to be affected by a paucity of legal scholars, case reports, and legal journals.