Does Modern Corporate Law Require a Minimum Share Capital?

Using examples from foreign legislation and doctrine, the author of this article addresses the legal and practical significance of requirements for the minimum size of authorized capital for business entities and the feasibility of maintaining it in current legislation. The article takes into account current state of the development of the legal mechanisms and trends toward automation and digitalization of law, as well as the subjective and objective determinants of the world, and uses the dialectical method and other general and specific scientific methods (such as comparative legal, historical analysis, synthesis, etc.). The result of this work is, among other things, a conclusion that the minimum authorized capital has largely lost its practical significance for certain organizational and legal business forms (for example, Unternehmergesellschaft (UG) and other limited liability and joint stock companies, excluding public ones and their equivalents), but also a recommendation to consider alternative solutions based on the specifics of each case. In this regard, it is practically justified to shift the emphasis in modern legal regulation towards using other progressive mechanisms, as indicated in the article and elsewhere, as more consistent with global trends, while maintaining the symbolic role of the fixed authorized capital as an indicator of the seriousness of founders' intentions.