Corporate Personhood

I'd like someone to talk me through the case against "corporate personhood", what they think it is and how we're harmed by it. I'll lay out a few of my questions and objections as a place to start, mostly summarizing material we covered in another thread:1) Since legal personhood - the notion that a corporation is a discreet legal entity that can own property and delegate agency - is the only reason a corporation can be sued in court, wouldn't we the people stand to lose quite a bit of our influence over corporations if we somehow dissolved corporate personhood? Consider the futility of trying to sue the Mafia or another organization that has no legal personhood. The loss of corporate personhood would drive all corporations into "organized crime" territory, at least in terms of trying to pursue civil remedy against them.2) There's frequently a need to get at the possessions of an organization in order to pursue civil remedies, criminal sanctions, and for probative discovery reasons. But the law should protect property owners from unlawful search and seizure - it's in the Constitution. Enormous erosions of our civil liberties have occurred as municipalities have sought ways to seize the property of organized crime. From RICO statutes, once used to prosecute Mafia crimes and now turned against union leaders, to civil forfeiture law where individuals not charged with crimes can have assets taken and auctioned against their will, now exploited to shore up budget shortfalls by police in municipalities that may have no significant drug problems. I submit that, in a world where corporations have no discreet legal identity, RICO and civil forfeiture would be the only way to get at the assets of a corporation, with the inevitable result of further municipal-level erosion of our civil rights.

So, instead of corporate personhood we'd have partnership personhood. I don't understand what we'd gain. You'd still have enormous mega-partnerships making mega-donations to influence the political process. I'm having a hard time imagining how anything would be any different for partnerships instead of corporations.

But you can be an employee of a partnership, right? Like, all the people involved in Coca-Cola wouldn't all be partners, right? I guess if a law firm is a partnership, then certainly law firms have employees too, so I guess that answers my question. At this point the notion of shares as part-ownership of a corporation really is an abstraction; for the most part shares are traded for capital gains, not for dividends. Relatively few corporations even pay dividends these days. Given the vanishing significance of dividends there's no reason you wouldn't expect the stock markets to just switch over to derivatives based on hypothetical shares of mega-partnerships as though they could release shares; every partnership would have an associated finance organization that would control the number of such derivatives released. It'd be just like the stock market, only no dividends (which hardly anybody pays anyway.) I want to address the case for getting rid of "corporate personhood", whatever that's supposed to mean. Currently I'm waiting for some of the participants to come over here and make that case. You seem to be offering a case to get rid of corporations entirely. Which is fine but that's not the topic, I don't think. We can talk about it until Hooah gets here, if you want. I only mention interference in the political process because that's supposed to be the major point in favor of getting rid of corporate personhood, but I don't see how it changes anything to have partnerships instead of corporations in that regard. I'm struggling to see any difference at all.

Much stock traded is non-voting, and certainly someone with but a handful of shares in Google (315 million shares outstanding) has no capacity to influence the corporation whatsoever. Google doesn't pay dividends, so again we're looking at a stock for which the sole market interest is in its capital appreciation. Speculation, in other words, in its purest form. And that can be done with derivatives. For some reason people like their meaningless pieces of paper that go up and down in value for no reason to have the names of corporations on them. Well, we can do that too, even in a world with no actual corporations. Right, but I think what people don't understand is that "in some respects as though they were people" is a description of the ability of corporations to be considered discreet legal entities that can own property, delegate agency - as in, appoint or designate people to act on behalf of the corporation, for instance to hire a lawyer to represent them - and appear in court.All that stuff is legal personhood. That's what legal personhood refers to. Taking that stuff away removes the ability to stand before a corporation in a court of law and make claims against it. Absent corporate personhood we're left with something akin to the prosecutions of mobsters - where it's a major legal struggle even to admit in point of fact that there is a Mafia that the defendant has ties to. Imagine trying to sue tobacco companies in a world where you have to sue each and every tobacco executive individually, and each and every executive says "RJ Reynolds? There's no such thing as RJ Reynolds. That's just a stereotype about Carolinans, that we're all involved in quote-tobacco activities-unquote!"In the real world, dealing with the Mafia was so difficult on its own that legislators jumped at the chance to erode civil liberties with new tools like RICO. I don't think it's unreasonable to fear the erosion of civil liberties as legislators and prosecutors scrambled for replacements for the traditional tools used to prosecute corporations. If there's no corporation, then what is the claim being made against? That's the problem. If the corporation isn't a legal person then its not something you can sue, because it can't appear in court. Just like how you can't sue the Mafia, or the color blue, or Mozart's "Die Fleidermouse."

Just wanted to get a link out to where we first started talking about this. Check Hooah's Message 262 and subsequent replies for background.

But that's corporate personhood - the ability of a corporation to appear before the court as a discreet entity that can own property and delegate agency.You keep misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that corporate personhood somehow implies the ability to sue a corporation. I'm informing you that "corporate personhood" means the ability of a corporation to appear in court and be sued. They're inextricable because they're the same thing. No, that's incorrect. That's one court's interpretation of the consequences of corporate personhood. That's not personhood itself. Personhood itself is the legal fiction that allows Coca-Cola to designate a lawyer to appear in court on its behalf. Absent that fiction, you could no more sue Coca-Cola or Walmart than you can sue the Mafia.

That's not what "legal personhood" means. Next!

Without legal personhood, no, it actually can't do any of those things. Without personhood it has no assets, so it cannot hire a laywer. Without personhood it can't delegate agency so a lawyer can't represent its members; the lawyer would have to be hired by and represent all the members individually. With no assets it can't make remedy; with no remedy, there's nothing for which to sue.Absent legal personhood a corporation doesn't exist before the law. There's nothing to bring a suit against. What does personhood have to do with that? That seems more like a consequence of just having a shitton of money.

No, I'm using the term specifically to refer to the legal recognition of the "corporation" as a singular entity that can own property, delegate agency, enter into contracts, and appear in court.I'm informing you that those things aren't the implications of "corporate personhood", they're the substance of corporate personhood. Absent corporate personhood none of that is possible, because if something can own property, enter into contracts, delegate agency, and appear in court it's a legal person. Right - and hence they had corporate personhood. Why does it have to be? That's the part I guess I don't understand. I've not asserted that "corporate personhood" extends to corporations any of the rights of a natural person except those rights that natural persons have because they're also legal persons. I don't think it's necessary or inevitable in the slightest. But this needs to be unpacked - what rights do you think they've been given, when were they given those rights, and what leads you to believe that those rights are implications of corporate personhood such that they can only be removed by removing legal personhood from all corporations? By all means, lets pick the nit.

You can't bring suit against something that doesn't exist. As they say, "no remedy, no right." If the counterparty to your suit doesn't legally exist, then the court can make no legal imposition of its will. Who are you going to sue? How are you going to find out who works or worked for the corporation if the corporation, having no legal existence, was not at any time required to submit an official list of employees and executives? As I keep saying, it would be like trying to sue the Mafia. Well, ok. Who's in the Mafia? Who's not?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Because that's what legal personhood is - legal existence. That's the difference between something that the law recognizes, like Coca-Cola, and something the law does not recognize, like the Mafia. I continue to be puzzled by the people who think that corporations have so much power that we should turn them into secret societies, instead. How the fuck does that make anything better? Yes, because, as a natural person you're also a legal person.

Oh, then I apologize.I'd like to talk to someone who opposes corporate personhood. That was sort of the point of all this. There was an argument made that corporate personhood allows corporations to have a distorting effect on our politics; I'd like to examine that argument. Right, that's my point. I'm explaining what is tautological about corporate personhood, such that if you grant those rights to corporations, they're legal persons; and if you deny that corporations are legal persons, they lose those rights. I'm responding to questions about why "corporate personhood" and the legal right to sue a corporation are inextricable; the explanation is that they're inextricable because they're the same thing. No, I'm not using the term like that. I'm using the term to explain how things actually get quite a bit worse, in regards to the influence and power corporations have over us and the influence and power we hold over them, if we strike legal personhood from corporations. The right to appear in court, the right to own property, the right to delegate agency. (Significantly, humans who were not considered legal persons in historical times were not granted these rights.) In other words rights that are only meaningful when one is recognized by a system of laws. The concept of "legal personhood" is like your avatar in the legal system, your projection, a legal fiction that allows you to be recognized within that conceptual system. Your legal person is the legal equivalent of your EvC identity "NoNukes", which comes with a suite of rights that are relevant within this space, and which humans who don't have an EvC identity cannot assert. They are now, under our legal system. They haven't always been and aren't now under every legal system around the world. It's very possible to be a human being who isn't a legal person; who is another person's property, instead. I don't disagree, and nor should they.

I don't think you have anything to apologize for. You've started a conversation, at least, and that's to your credit. I'm sorry if I put you on the spot.

Are you sure this is true? I'd like to see the relevant evidence. These aren't examples of unique restrictions on the speech of corporations, but of unique restrictions on the speech of persons participating in certain kinds of markets. For instance, the requirement to place certain labels on certain kinds of goods holds true regardless of whether the products are sold by corporations or by individuals. I think speech is considered speech, and I don't understand how you restrict the ability of a corporation to hire certain kinds of speech on its behalf without infringing on the rights of a person who works for the corporation to hire certain kinds of speech. And also I'm not sure how you restrict the ability of corporations to participate politically without also restricting the ability of unions to participate politically. While I share most people's concerns about the distorting influence of money on politics, I think the reform won't work from the supply side. I think we have to move to a system where either all campaigns are funded publically, or one (advanced by political theorists at MIT) where anybody can donate what they like, but the donations are obscured, such that the politician and his campaign (or anybody else) aren't able to determine who actually made any particular donation. It becomes impossible to influence a campaign except in the most general sense if the politician isn't able to connect any particular donation to any particular interest.

Well, but that's the problem - money is fungible. Money spent by the corporation for political campaigns can just be money given to employees with a "hint" about which campaigns they should donate it to.