Corporate Personhood

They aren't people.That was easy.Jon

And, of course, all these problems are easily solved by not recognizing non-people things as people.

And, of course, money isn't speech, regardless of who's spending it.Jon

So? Who cares? Absolute bullshit. 100% Crap.Any corporation is made up of people. People on top of people on top of other people.There are plenty of real people to sue in a corporation without pretending the corporation is a person of its own.

Just make the head boss legally responsible by default, regardless of when he came on or how much hand he had in the making of the product, dumping of the toxic waste, etc.It then falls on him to prove that someone else is more responsible than he is. If he can't do that, then he's the one who goes to court.JonEdited by Jon, : Coding error

Who said there would be no legal existence?Why must legal existence entail legal personhood?Why must lack of legal personhood rule out responsible parties?Does my property exist? Am I responsible for my property and what happens on it?Is my property a person?

Sue that other person instead.Jon

And that's a realistic problem. But I can see a system that works around such problems. For example, the head boss could be ultimately responsible by default, and so is always the party who gets sued; leaving it up to him to sue someone else he thinks is responsible.You end up with two separate cases, and the party injured by the product, toxic waste, etc. still gets their compensation, and the head boss can still seek his own damages from an underling who was perhaps intentionally acting against the company's policies and subverting its authority in enforcing those policies, or a third party that sold his company defective parts, etc.I'm not saying all the answers are straight forward, but I do think it is possible to run the system in such a way that doesn't grant legal personhood to some non-person entity and all the risks that go along with that.Jon

I think the owners/operators of these large companies will be more likely to evaluate their decisions and take necessary precautions to prevent damages from their companies' actions if they are personally responsible for those damages rather than hiding behind their faceless organizations.It's good that we can sue Shell for a cancer cluster that pops up near its refineries, but it'd be even better if the cancer cluster never happened in the first place because the head boss and managers of the company were all so afraid of going to prison for the rest of their miserable lives that they wouldn't dare make one sacrifice in overseeing the proper disposal and management of byproducts from the obviously deadly product that they trade in.A system built on personal, not corporate, responsibility, I think, incentives for much better behavior coming from large companies.Jon

That's something on the line of what I was getting at. This was the purpose of my proposal that the chief boss always be the one who is, by default, the party sued. If he owns/is in charge of the company, then he holds full responsibility for anything his company (which includes his employees, not just his material property) does. If he feels one of his employees acted contrary to their employment contract in causing the damages, then that is a separate case for him to pursue in seeking restitution from that employee.Jon

I consider ownership above management. The owners would be responsible by default.