University of Hertfordshire

Despite agreement on many points, including our shared insistence that ‘corporation’ and ‘firm’ are different concepts, Jean-Philippe Robé still maintains that they are mutually exclusive: no corporation is a firm, and no firm is a corporation. In contrast, we follow standard nomenclature when we point out that all (business) corporations are firms, but some firms are not corporations. We show here that this is standard practice among lawyers writing in leading law journals. We discuss Robé’s rejection of the need to take account of widespread usage of terms like ‘firm’ and note that he seems to have abandoned the task of defining the firm.