Kerim Aydin wrote: >Perhaps the new PP is an entirely new, unregistered person, and the old >PP has "died".
I believe it has. In fact, assuming the minimal case that there has been exactly one new partner, there have been three different partnerships which the PP agreement called "the Pineapple Partnership". >might have a zombie on our hands, with no-one able to deregister on >its behalf. We've never had the death of a natural player, which I think is an accurate model for this. In either case, the legal person has ceased to exist (or, at least, it has ceased to be a legal person). R869 doesn't specifically address this, and in fact we have no rule that states that only persons can be legal players. The restriction is merely that only persons are permitted and able to register. You're probably right, therefore. A player who ceases to be a person remains a player, and would have to be deregistered by proposal or some other rule-defined mechanism. >> In RL law it can't: the partnership is a fixed group of natural persons. > >Uh, how does a law firm add "partners" then? It is replaced by a new partnership, which inherits the assets, liabilities, employees, and clients of the former partnership. This is an inconvenience of the partnership structure, but smoothed over by writing contracts that anticipate the need. The way law firms are organised internally is more like a corporation than a mundane partnership. They use legal partnerships due to a prohibition on corporations practising law. Corporations are beholden to shareholders, which would provide a huge conflict of interest with lawyers' various legal duties. Also, in the UK lawyers (along with accountants) are forbidden to operate with limited liability. UK and US law both contain special provisions for partnerships of lawyers, to let them operate in a more corporate-like manner while using the otherwise-unsuitable legal structure of a partnership. For example, in the UK there is a legal limit on the number of partners in a partnership, from which law firms are exempt. For a similar legal situation, look at Lloyd's syndicates (the London insurance market). A syndicate is legally constituted with a fixed, unchangeable set of members. It spends a year selling insurance, then two more years paying out on claims, then buys reinsurance covering all remaining claims and closes. Three years after formation the syndicate is dissolved, with a final profit or loss shared between the members. The terminal reinsurer is almost always a syndicate formed the following year, with the same identifying number and most of the same members. >From the outside this looks like the syndicate with a particular number is an ongoing business, year to year, paying out on claims on policies it sold many years ago, and occasionally changing members. One could set up the same kind of structure in Agora, except for the hurdle of reregistering every time the membership changes. -zefram
