Common lawyers are notoriously suspicious of legal theory. This is exemplified by the dearth of theoretical content in Australian corporate law debate. If the first sin of legal theory is “to presume that it can offer a blueprint for actual decision-making and be a substitute for judicial and lawyerly wisdom”, then surely it is an equal transgression to profess that judicial and lawyerly wisdom can for long elude criticism without a sound theoretical basis. Reasoning by analogy is commonplace. This is as true in legal reasoning as in any other discipline. Indeed, it has been suggested that in the Australian legal context analogical reasoning is the very same “judicial and lawyerly wisdom” referred to above. In order to determine whether there is a true analogy, a number of legal scholars have suggested that a variety of potential known source analogues should be carefully analysed for their potential relevance to a less familiar target analogue lest an inapt analogy should lead one into error. The modern trading company is widely regarded as an apt source analogue for resolving jurisprudential issues involving incorporated associations and societies. However the basis upon which this assertion is made has never been adequately elucidated. This thesis tests the hypothesis that the modern trading company is the most apt source analogue for developing a jurisprudence of incorporated associations and societies. This is achieved using a theoretical approach drawn from corporate realist theory that is informed by an epidemiological investigation of incorporated sporting associations and societies in Australia and New Zealand.

This thesis examines various aspects of English and Canadian charity law in terms of their relationship with the contested categories of ‘public law’ and ‘private law’. It argues that the law of charities can be regarded as a hybrid legal discipline in both a general or categorical sense, and in the context-specific or functional sense that both the conditions for obtaining charitable status, and the regulation of the conduct of charities and their trustees, are continually being adjusted in such a way as to maintain in a broad sense a functional equilibrium between individual project pursuit and collective project pursuit; that is to say, an equilibrium between the protection of the autonomy of property-owning individuals to control and direct their own wealth, and the furtherance of competing public interests or visions of the good. After sketching out the history and nature of the common law charities tradition and the contemporary English and Canadian regulatory regimes, the thesis pursues its analytical and comparative hypotheses by examining two important features of English and Canadian charity law, the public benefit doctrine and the rules of locus standi that determine who may seek relief for misapplications of charity property. It then addresses the comparatively modern issue of the governmental co-optation of charitable resources, considering to what extent modern pressures associated with the retrenchment of welfare states threaten to destabilize charity law’s hybrid equilibrium in EW and Canada. The thesis then turns to the emerging phenomenon of social enterprise, arguing that shifts to charity law’s functional equilibrium may explain the emergence of this ‘post-charitable’ legal form. The thesis concludes with some observations on the hybrid nature of the law of charities, and on the different functional equilibriums between individual project pursuit and collective project pursuit that have been reached by English and Canadian charity law.