Corporate Personhood

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.

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

I don't believe corporations have any rights which can be removed only by removing legal personhood.I'd like to see the first amendment rights given to corporations weakened to the extent that limits on campaign financing such as those included in the laws invalidated by the Supreme Court last year would stand. The above is a mere tautology. Corporations have been right to hold property and enter into contracts, etc., and we call that state of the law legal personhood.You are using the term personhood as if it were a quality we granted to or recognized for business entities so that we could allow the entitites to have human like rights. That's simply not the case. What rights are there that real humans have only as legal persons? Not many in my estimation, and certainly none that anyone realistically talks about limiting for corporations. All natural persons are legal persons. With the possible exception of the rights granted specifically to certain groups of people (e.g. women's suffrage and possibly the rights granted in amendments 13-15), it is impossible to parse out which rights humans have only as legal persons except on an adhoc basis; we can of course simply note those rights that non-persons are never given.But that said, corporations don't enjoy all of the protections in the Bill of Rights. Corporations do not enjoy the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self incrimination. I doubt that the second amendment applies to corporations although I haven't looked into it.

Well apart from the difficulty of locating them, what if they don't have any assets?

Well, this "legal personhood" is the way we've found to give them legal existence and responsibilities and potential culpability. If you'd like some other way to do exactly the same thing, then that would be a distinction without a difference. If you'd like them not to be held legally responsible, then I think that that's a bad idea. But I don't think that that's what you're getting at.It should be pointed out that the legal personality of corporations does not prevent individuals within the corporation from being brought to book. Ask Ken Lay if you don't believe me. But what it does mean is that there is always something you can bring to book. And this is, I think, good.

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

But then what if the boss isn't remotely responsible, but the total assets of the person who is consists of a half-eaten Kit-Kat and a spoon?Shouldn't our justice system produce some sort of semblance of justice?

But, as I pointed out, the notion that the corporation is responsible doesn't pre-empt the notion that the management are also personally responsible. What we have is a situation where at the very least the corporation is responsible for things that it does wrong. This doesn't prevent us from holding individuals within the corporation responsible as well.

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'm going to suck it up and admit that I obviously do not understand the topic well enough to have a reasoned debate, or even discussion, about it. It appears that I came to a conclusion and formed an opinion without enough knowledge of the subject (shame on me). I apologize, crash, for prodding you into starting this topic. However, I assure you I initially had every intention of actually discussing it, but realizing how little I know about what "corporate personhood" actually does entail, I fear I will just look foolish if I continue.

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.