Delaware General Corporation Law - History

History

See also: Regulatory competition and Race to the bottom

Delaware acquired its status as a corporate haven in the early 20th century. Following the example of New Jersey, which enacted corporate-friendly laws at the end of the 19th century to attract businesses from New York, Delaware played the game of fiscal competition by adopting in 1899 a general incorporation act aimed at attracting more businesses. Before the rise of general incorporation acts, forming a corporation required a special act of the state legislature. General incorporation allowed anyone to form a corporation by simply raising money and filing articles of incorporation with the state government's secretary of state.

Read more about this topic:  Delaware General Corporation Law

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    [Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.
    Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)