Business
Associations Class Notes
Shipman’s
office is in 215. There will be one
in-class exam scheduled as scheduled by the Dean’s Office. It will be all essay,
5-7 moderately brief problem-type questions.
I think he said it will be three hours long. If you don’t cut to the chase by the third
full paragraph, you’re probably never going to cut to the chase. So cut to the chase when you write for a
Shipman exam!
Old
exam questions will be available for our study.
There will be a review session coming up soon.
Why are we here?
This
is a bar subject: agency, partnership, and corporations are a big bar subject. In a couple of years, we’ll be able to
connect with the bar review people and figure out what’s what.
Agency
is the “step-child” of the curriculum.
We’ll be taught enough in here to hook up with the bar review
people. “Spinach
before ice cream.” Take your bar
courses! The bar review people start in
the “middle”. The
Also,
a lot of lawyers actually do this
type of work. If you practice family
law, you’ll use this stuff every day. If you do real estate law, franchise law,
international law, tax law and stuff like that you’ll use this material every
day you practice. If you litigate, you’ll
see a lot of litigation in this area.
Finally,
business is very important in the “American scheme of things”. This course is basic literacy for
understanding business in the
What
about disadvantages of the course? It’s
intense! If you fall asleep, you’re
screwed! You have to keep your outline
up-to-date because we’ll cover the equivalent of eight sessions per week. But the advantage is that people are more
relaxed in the summer than general. And
the weather is better! That’s a
plus. Also, the concentrated nature of
the class helps keep your mind on the subject.
During the semester, you can get distracted by other courses.
But
another disadvantage is that it will be the first course with a heavy emphasis
on statutes and regulations. They are taken seriously. We don’t practice philosophy concerning the statutes
and regulations, we master them. Some will love it, some will hate it, but it’s
a fact of life that lawyers must deal with this.
This
is the first course in law school that is heavily
operational. Evidence, Tax, Secured
Transactions, and International Business are also heavily operational. We look at the conceptual end too, but mostly
the operational side. We’ll spend a
modest amount of time on the role of the lawyer in these transactions, which is
important because lawyers can get themselves in a lot of trouble.
So,
prepare reasonably well each day, take good notes, outline once a week, come to
the review sessions, and it will come together in a good way by the end. There are advanced courses beyond this, but
the foundational course is usually the most important.
If
you must miss a class or two, don’t worry about it, but if it goes beyond that,
check with Shipman or give his secretary a memo. Shipman expects reasonably good attendance.
Another
minus: these classes are long! At
John Locke
Let’s
begin at the beginning (a very good place to start)…with John Locke. In the 1670’s, he wrote in support of the Whig
view of the world. The Whigs were
opposed to the views of Hobbes, who supported absolute power in the king. Locke’s writing blends economics and political
science. It goes well beyond Aristotle
and Plato, who were very disdainful of commercial and business
undertakings. But by Locke’s time, the
situation had changed both in
The Wealth of Nations
About
100 years later, Adam Smith came around with The Wealth of Nations. Smith went beyond Locke and talked about the
need for management added to labor
and capital and the need for free markets, which both
Associations
1. Sole proprietorship
2. General partnership and
three related types
3. Not-for-profit (can be
incorporated or not) – Note: Can be charitable or non-charitable
4. For-profit corporations
(business corporations) – can be mutual
5. Some trusts
Everybody
classifies associations a different way.
This is Shipman’s way, and it’s as good as anything.
Sole proprietorships
Sole proprietorships have a long history, and
they are still around today. Joe Jones
runs a small grocery store as a sole proprietor. What does that mean? There is no
business association there. Joe is
simply running it. His whole estate is liable for all of the
debts of the grocery store. If he wants
to sell the grocery store, he has to
make out the bills of sale and the deeds and then he’ll have to consider tax
factors. With a sole proprietorship, the
individual Form 1040 of Joe Jones will reflect his income or loss from the
grocery store along with his other income or loss. Where is it reflected? It’s on Schedule C of Form 1040. Joe will be taxed on his total income (if he’s single) at the current tax rate, which runs
up to about 36% for federal income tax, and in Ohio it will run up to
6.9%. It’s higher in a few states.
But
is that all? No. His income, up to a maximum of about $82,000,
will be subject to a self-employment tax (yuck). That’s part of the Social Security
system. This tax will be about 160% of
what an employee of an incorporation would pay. If you’re an employee, you pay about 7-8% on
the first $80,000, and the corporation pays the same amount. It goes into your Social Security
account. If you’re a sole proprietor,
you have to pay both income tax and the substantial self-employment tax. But that’s not all either! There’s a Medicare tax that is unlimited in
amount. Are we finished? No.
Joe should be using either a
corporation or an LLC (a limited liability company). The LLC is a “child” of the last twenty years. What is its big advantage? It has all the tax advantages of a general partnership,
and it also has the corporate
advantage of limited liability. No one
who is thinking advertently uses a
sole proprietorship or a general partnership.
You’ll go for an LLC or a corporation.
Another comment on Mr. Jones. We’re not
finished with him yet. If Joe is married, he will most likely file a joint return with his wife. At times, they’re better off filing separate
returns, but that is relatively rare.
Usually, you’ll save money filing joint returns. Does the wife take a risk by signing the
joint federal income tax return? Family
law and tax law will constantly bubble up in this course, and this is a
family/tax law problem. If the wife
files her own separate return, then
she has no individual liability if her husband’s return is screwed up. If a joint
return is filed, generally, the wife will have joint and several liability,
even if the screw-up relates to the husband’s income, but there are two or three affirmative “innocent spouse” defenses
that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
We’ll see more about this when we take more tax courses. When you file a joint return, each spouse has
a duty to make sure that the tax return is in order. “You’re in bed with your spouse in more ways
than one…and you can get screwed in more ways than one, as Bubba would say.”
We
won’t talk about sole proprietorships very much, because a lawyer setting one
of these up is almost malpractice per se. Usually, if a business is getting set up this
way, the guy is doing it himself.
For
today, we read the old statute on general partnerships. This is the statute as of 1914. In
General partnerships
Here’s
the definition: A general partnership is
one in which all partners are general partners. The emphasis here is on general. Under UPA §§ 1-18,
plus 40, there is joint and several
liability on the part of all partners for the tort debts of the general partnership, and there is joint liability for all of the partners’
contract debts. When you read §§ 18 and 40 and put them
together, you will find that you can sue not only the partnership for the
assets it has, but if it doesn’t have enough, you can go after the individual partners
and reach their personal estates.
Ouch! That’s called the disadvantage of unlimited personal liability. It’s a big disadvantage…how come? No one with any sense advertently forms a general
partnership today. For a lawyer to
recommend it is malpractice per se. Why?
We’ll find at the end of the course that in the last 25 years, the LLC
has arrived and the Ohio LLC statute, O.R.C. § 1705, is excellent. The LLC, with
proper drafting, will give the tax advantages of a general partnership with the
limited liability advantage of a corporation.
“AC/DC! Going both ways at the
same time and loving it! A business feast!”
Why
are we putting partnerships off until the end of the course? There are two tough parts of the course. (1) Securities, which we’ll get to in about
2.5 weeks. (2) Partnerships are
tough. They’re not superficially tough,
but when we go through them in depth, we’ll have headaches. We won’t frontload the course with them. Also, corporations are more logical, and once
you go through the logical corporate setup, you can make the transition to partnerships
fairly easily. Just learning partnerships
on its own without some agency law under our belts will drive us crazy.
So
what is the great tax advantage of general partnerships? We will find after the break that corporations
in this country historically have been subject to a double tax. It’s been
modified a lot in the last 45 years, but big portions of it still remain. This is because a corporation is considered
as a full-fledged legal entity separate from the shareholders for tax and other
purposes. As such, historically, the corporation
was subject to tax on what it earned, and then, when it paid dividends, the
dividends were fully taxable again to the shareholder recipients. By the end of today, we’ll see that there
have been two ameliorations of that, though to some extent it’s still
true. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the
ability of Congress to do this even before the Sixteenth Amendment was
passed. It was said that the government bestows
the privilege upon people to set up
an entity with limited liability, and thus Congress can levy a tax on that privilege.
A general
partnership, because it has three strong
non-resemblances to a corporation, is not subject to income taxes. The emphasis
is on income taxes, because a general
partnership is subject to excise taxes,
it must withhold taxes on salaries of employees, it is subject to sales taxes but it isn’t subject to income
taxes. How has Congress treated general
partnerships since 1913? They have said
that, in general, with some
exceptions to follow later, the partnership is considered a non-entity for
income tax purposes. The income and
losses of the partnership flow through
to the individual partners and is taxed to
them. However, by statute, the partnership must file information returns with the IRS.
Those information returns enable the IRS to collect from the partners.
As
to employees of the partnership, they’re
just like corporate employees. The partnership
must pay and withhold Social Security tax.
Partners pay taxes just like sole proprietors. Each quarter, they must file a declaration of
estimated taxes for the year and pay one-fourth of it. When they file their final return, they “settle
up”. If they paid too much, they’ll get
a refund, and if they paid too little, they’ll have to write another check to
the IRS. Until 1960, general partnerships
were very popular in the service areas, for example, law, accounting, medicine,
dentistry, and engineering. This is
because there was no double taxation, and state statutes as to law, doctors,
dentists and accountants provided that those professions had to practice as
sole proprietors or general partnerships to expose to the world not only the
assets the partnership owned, but also the personal property of the partners
individually.
Congress
discerned that there were three significant non-corporate attributes of a general
partnership:
1. Personal liability of all of the partners for the debts of the partnership in addition to
the partnership itself being liable.
This is huge!
2. §§ 18-32 of the UPA 1914 introduce
us to the idea that a general partnership is easily dissolved.
Dissolution is defined specially in the UPA and it has an odd meaning. It doesn’t mean death. It means a “change in
legal relationship among the partners”. It
says, for example, that death, retirement, or bankruptcy of any general partner causes dissolution of the partnership, but not
the death of the partnership. What it does mean, however, is that the party
leaving the partnership by death,
retirement, or bankruptcy is entitled to
the amount credited to her capital account and, unless the parties have contracted
otherwise, entitled to that amount in fairly short order.
Compare this to the situation of Jones Retail Store, Inc. It has four siblings working in the store. Upon the death of one of the Jones siblings,
there is no dissolution, meaning that the widow of the dying Jones sibling cannot get the fair value of the shares from
the company unless there is a
specific contractual provision to the contrary.
That’s just the opposite from a general partnership because the death,
retirement, bankruptcy, or insanity of one or more shareholders of a corporation
does not affect the ongoing life of
the corporation. The corollary to that
is that the same is true even if one or more or all of the shareholders assign
all of their shares to somebody else. Thus,
the corporation is guaranteed by law to have perpetual life! Whereas with
the general partnership, death, retirement, bankruptcy or insanity cause
dissolution. The guy who went crazy can
withdraw his whole capital account.
3. With a corporation, unless
there are valid reasonable restraints on alienation, any or all shareholders
can sell any or all of their shares to anyone for any reason at any time. “Daddy Warbucks
walks again!” Needless to say, even the
closely held corporation with a few shareholders is set up in such a way to
sell its shares to the public if the public wants it. We’ll spend more time on that later: the
IPO. For example, Google
is about to do their IPO. The owners of Google will be billionaires. They won’t be as rich as Bill Gates, “but
hey, you won’t have to give them soup money.”
The general partnership, on the other hand, is set up for non-public ownership.
These
three differences led Congress to say that a general partnership doesn’t
resemble a corporation very much. When
we get to the LLC, clever drafters at the state level came up with a new animal
from civil law countries like
We’ll
move right along covering just a part of the law of associations.
Not-for-profit associations
If
you’ve read Detoqueville, you’re very aware of his
emphasis on “voluntary associations”, or non-profit associations in the private
sector. These organizations mediate between the government and the
population at large. Take the church,
for example. Or
political parties, or chambers of commerce, or Sunkist. Or you form “The Committee to Fight the Power
Lines”. All of these are different from
General Motors. Their goal is to make
profits for their shareholders.
Not-for-profit associations can be incorporated or unincorporated. The
not-for-profit corporation statute in
Tomorrow,
we’ll talk about a recent Fifth Circuit case involving two famous political
figures: Karl Rove and Richard Thornburgh (former United States Attorney
General). Most politicians incorporate their campaign committee. That’s because at the end of the day, the committee
may have run up more debts than they are able to pay. If you incorporate, then the candidate can
walk away from the debts at the end. On
the other hand, Thornburgh did not incorporate his campaign committee. He hired Rove, who did a good job for him,
but he lost, and he owed $400,000 or so to Rove. Rove was not a shy fellow, and he personally
sued Thornburgh. In “one of the damndest opinions I have ever read”, Shipman found that
They
also lectured Thornburgh on a way out of the dilemma if he was stupid enough
not to incorporate. They said that he
could have used “non-recourse contracts or notes”. This is very important! We’ll run into this three or four times in
the course. If, the court held, the contract with Rove had stated that only the
assets of the committee could be reached by Rove, then in a contract case this
provision would have been fully valid and would have sent Rove back to
So
not-for-profits can be incorporated or not, but you should always incorporate them.
Most states have good statutes about this. Look at O.R.C. § 1702 or Oleck.
Not-for-profit
corporations will not have shareholders,
they will have members. The people who run the not-for-profit will be
called directors or trustees. Below them will be officers. Beneath them will
be non-officer executives. And below that, you have “the people who
actually do the work”. There will be
creditors in a not-for-profit corporation.
Why
do we care about § 1702? At the end of
§§ 1701 and 1702, they both state the following: “§ 1701 applies to corporations
formed under other chapters (e.g. §
1702), except to the extent that § 1702 is inconsistent
with § 1701, in which event you go to § 1702.”
Is it always to determine when there is inconsistency? No. Go
to § 1702, and you’ll find the mirror
image of that. It says: “In
construing this chapter, construe it with § 1701, except if § 1701 is inconsistent, in which case use this statute.” The specific
trumps the general every time.