Corporate Personhood

I think your concern about who will own the property that a corporation owns if corporations are dissolved is misplaced. In essence, a corporation is simply a way for one or more people to own property in a way that their personal assets are protected, and a way for an entity to continue existence beyond the end of the lives of those who own it.If corporations were dissolved, people would still be able to own property together in groups. Instead, those groups would be partnerships rather than corporations. The main legal distinction between a partnership and a corporation is that partners are personally liable for partnership debts and obligations. Without a corporation, it may be more difficult to track down all the partners and all their assets, but not that much more difficult.I'm having a hard time imagining how the abuses of forfeiture laws would be any different for partnerships as opposed to corporations.

There are practical limits on the size of partnerships. Millions can own a corporation through shares. Having millions of partners is impractical.As I said, the main difference between partnership ownership and corporate ownership is that partners are personally liable for partnership obligations. Ordinarily, corporate owners are not.I'm a little confused that in your second post, you seem to be shifting your concern from forfeiture abuse to corporate interference in the political process. Which problem do you want to address? Both?

Perhaps this is getting far afield from what you wanted to talk about, but in the context of the question of ownership, the impact of shares is the voice that the shareholder has in the operation of the corporation. Obviously, this can vary greatly depending on whether there are 2 shareholders each owning 50% of the stock or millions of shareholders each holding a miniscule percentage of the stock. But in essence, shares are how many different people own and control (in varying degrees) a corporation, as opposed to how a partnership is owned. Well, I'm not offering a case for getting rid of corporations at all. I began simply by discussing the particular problem you laid out about forfeiture.As I understand the notion of "corporate personhood," it's the legal fiction of treating corporations in some respects as though they were people and granting them some of the rights that people have. The abolition of corporate personhood, or the curtailing of the number of rights that we decide corporations are entitled to, would at first blush appear to have nothing to do with a corporation's status as a legal entity apart from its owners (depending on what rights we decide to eliminate).Obviously, to the extent that a particular corporation may exist only as a way for its owners to exercise First Amendment rights, disallowing corporations that right would effectively put an end to that kind of corporation. However, it certainly would not prevent a typical business corporation, say WidgetsRUs Ltd, from manufacturing and selling widgets. Nor would it prevent the corporation from owning property or incurring liabilities. And it would have no effect on the ability of anyone from making any claim against the corporation that they felt they had.

I might share your fear if I had the first reason to suppose that laws that allow the creation of corporations were to be repealed and corporations were going to be no more. Do you have some reason to believe that that is imminent, or even being seriously discussed by anyone who has the ability to do that?

From Message 262, The fallacy here, of course, is the implicit assumption that "personhood" is an all or nothing proposition. There are certain rights of personhood that a corporation may never exercise by virtue of the nature of what a corporation is. A corporation cannot engage in the free exercise of religion. To talk about infringing a corporation's reproductive freedom is nonsense.In addition, there's nothing inherently irrational about deciding that a corporation may have some rights accorded to people (the right to own property and access to the courts) and still deciding that other rights (freedom of speech, for example) shall not be accorded to a corporation.

It doesn't. Corporations existed before they were granted limited rights of personhood, and corporations owned property and were subject to suit for their liabilities as well. Let's take that one at a time.No, corporations aren't allowed to buy off politicians. In fact, a corporation actually has less direct influence with politicians than people do because corporations are forbidden from donating to campaigns or political parties. So, as I discussed above, corporations actually do not have all the rights of personhood. And, obviously, no person has the right to buy off politicians either. This is called bribery and is a felony.Second, I'm actually hard-pressed to see a legitimate reason to prohibit corporations from spending their own money as they see fit to try to influence the political process. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." It doesn't say people have the right to freedom of speech. It says Congress cannot abridge the freedom of speech. There's no mention whatsoever of who the speaker is. By its very terms, nowhere in the First Amendment is the freedom of speech limited to people.The basic idea behind freedom of speech is that the remedy for speech that you disagree with is not to restrict that speech but rebut it with speech of your own in the marketplace of ideas. Obviously, this idea is the same whether the speaker is a corporation or an actual person. Speech is speech regardless of who the speaker is.Let me ask you this: what is it that you object to, that corporations are allowed to advocate for positions that you disagree with or that corporations are allowed to advocate for positions at all? Would you object to an organization promoting the First Amendment running ads against Rick Santorum? Would you object to an abortion rights organization running ads against Rick Perry? Or do you simply object that corporations have too much money available to spend in attempting to influence an election?

Well, the recent Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 1 (2010), wasn't about a corporation wanting to donate money to a PAC. It involved an organization that wanted to run its own television commercial. Are you going to try to argue that speech isn't speech, or that a political commercial isn't speech because the organization had to spend money to air it?

You don't seem to understand the concept of "don't have any assets." If the head boss doesn't have any assets, he's what is called judgment proof. There's no reason to sue him because there's no way to get any money from him.If we consider the typical multinational corporation, the amount of damage that can be done by mismanagement or negligence vastly exceeds the total assets of all but a small handful of individuals. That means that in the event of a huge liability situation, like say the Ford Pinto, virtually everyone injured will have no way to collect any damages.

All true, but irrelevant to the point I was making to Jon.Jon was proposing individual liability to replace corporate liability. Your hypothetical still includes corporate liability, albeit vicarious. If there is no Exxon, but instead only the CEO or COB to go after, we still have the problem of insufficient assets in catastrophic damages situations.

I have only the dimmest idea what any of that means, and can't begin to see what any of it has to do with the topic of this thread.

And well they should, since a corporation has no Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. Braswell v. United States, 487 U.S. 99 (1988)