Corporate Personhood

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.

No need. It showed me that I need to brush up on the subject and come to an informed decision.

I don't think very many people oppose corporate personhood in the way you want to discuss it even if the words they say or post seem to imply that position.What people oppose is granting corporations rights that are not essential to operating a corporation. For example, people who are opposed to the undue political influence of corporations, probably aren't opposed to corporations being parties to contracts or being parties in law suits.There are actually a few cases where corporations have been granted rights by statute than exceed those of natural persons. For example a copyright in a work for hire held a corporations has a longer duration that would the copyright in the same work held by an author who is a natural person.

This is both true and odd; but on the other hand there is (AFAIK) nothing that says that an author can't establish a corporation, solely owned by him, which owns his works.

Removed a duplicate postEdited by NoNukes, : Removed a duplicate post

Not so fast.Even without corporate liability, if an employee makes a boo-boo in the course of his duties, other principles can be invoked to get at the company assets.For example, if the family breadwinner gets hit by a gasoline truck driven by an Exxon mobile employee, the principle of respndeat superior makes the employer vicariously liable for the driver's damages. The family gets full restitution from Exxon, who can in turn then seek compensation from the driver.Vicarious liability is difficult to apply in cases where the injured party must find the employee or employees responsible before suing. It's even possible that no employee can be found to have committed an act that would make him personally liable. In that case, without ability to sue the corporation, injured parties cannot be compensated.

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

In practice, wouldn't the result of this be that a CEO would always have written into his contract that the corporation will pay for his defense and reimburse him for any damages he's found liable for?

If the ultimate liable person is the head boss, then you only get to the head boss' assets and not to the assets of the corporation. In the case of small, privately owned companies you might find that to be satisfactory, because you can get at the company assets. But what about cases where the company is public, the CEO owns only some shares in the company, and the injury is on the level of the Bhopal disaster. The CEO may have tens/hundreds of millions in assets, but the injuries may be valued in the tens of billions.I guess I'm arguing crashfrog's case. Why do you really want to remove the ability to sue Union Carbide (who ended up paying a trivial amount to the Bhopal gas victims)? Does doing so really addressing the particular problems that you are really concerned about?

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

So for the huge, publicly owned company in my example, you would sue the shareholders, since they are the owners. But the shareholders aren't involved in the day to day operation of the company unless they also happen to be mangers/executives.I don't think your plan works. What is it about the current procedure of suing the corporation that you find objectionable? What is accomplished by making corporations unable to be sued?

Yes, well, that's not always going to be practical. In the case of the Bhophal disaster, for example, the factory was owned by Union Carbide. Union Carbide is wholly owned by Dow Chemical. The volume of Dow Chemical shares is 8.2 million. I'm not sure how many of those are held by small investors, but you might end up having to build a courtroom the size of the Titanic. However, when Dow Chemical, the corporation, is sued, the money they pay out negatively impacts the dividends and share price of their shares, thus making the investors poorer in exact proportion to the number of shares they hold. Is this not satisfactory?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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 don't think there are many people who talk about getting rid of corporate personhood would, if drilled down, think that a corporation shouldn't be a legal entity with its own rights and responsibilities. That is after all, why corporations came in to being in the first place.The issue is more over what power the logical entity that is a corporation should have. In the most recent situation, corporations were granted a semblance of "freedom of speech" by the virtue that this is a right we grant to natural persons. The problem I see is that there many other instances where we deny a corporation freedom of speech for perfectly legitimate and mostly non-contoversial reasons.For example, a corporation cannot publicly state that their product is effective for the treatment of a disease without the government's approval. That is explicit censorship of ideas that corporation might certainly want to make and may even be true but does not have the right to make without consulting a body that is the product of our democracy.Corporations are also uniquely FORCED to produce speech in certain circumstances. You cannot sell food in the US without a nutrition label and you cannot sell tobacco products without a warning.In other cases, a corporation having the freedom of speech is of utmost importance. The ability for a corporation to ignore a gag order about a NSL was vital in protecting everyone's freedoms in an ever growing security state.So right or wrong, agree or not, the current state of our democracy supports the freedom of speech for corporations in some cases and not others. The argument is therefore about where to draw the line.I for one think that rather than abolishing the concept of corporat personhood, we need to establish a CLEAR concept of corporatehood and give it an explicit set of instructions such as a Corporate Bill of Rights.One of the items in there that I think would be important would be to make sure that in the case of corporations, assets are not considered speech. Fundamentally that means that a corporation is NOT allowed to do whatever it wants with its money. That way, if we decide that corporations cannot donate to political campaigns or run political advertisements, we can do so by virtue of controlling their spending without limiting the content of their speech that may be good in other circumstances.

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.