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This seems like a false dilemma - either corporations are legally protected as individuals by the Bill of Rights, or they are totally unprotected. Wouldn't it m

This seems like a false dilemma - either corporations are legally protected as individuals by the Bill of Rights, or they are totally unprotected. Wouldn't it make sense to treat them as something other than people, since they are not, in fact, people, and give them a separate set of protections? To expand, corporations came into existence so that an entity other than an entity other than individuals could own property, and so that the individuals could take on risks without bankrupting themselves, right? Couldn't that be honored without treating corporations like individuals?

grellas 17y ago
For-profit corporations (and similar business entities) are sanctioned by law not just for limited liability purposes but also to facilitate business goals that arise when people want to associate for some sort of concerted action. Thus, a corporate format facilitates sophisticated ways by which people can own and do things through concerted efforts, by which they can transfer their ownership interests or borrow against them while putting them up as collateral, by which they can divide management from ownership such that an enterprise can be owned by broad numbers of passive investors while being managed by (supposedly) expert executives, etc. If corporations are so sanctioned, they must be given at least some enforceable rights by which they can legally protect and promote their interests (e.g., the right to sue). Were they denied such rights, then the only way, for example, that a corporate entity could sue to collect a debt would be for the lawsuit to be filed in the several names of the owners - a clearly unworkable way to proceed for any organization that becomes much more than a family-owned entity. Thus, the law creates what it clearly recognizes as a fiction and gives rights to the entities to act in their own names. The label put on this fiction is that of a "legal person" - that is, one that the law knows is not a living, breathing human being but that the law treats as having rights similar to those held by real individuals for the limited purposes for which this is needed. As it does this sort of thing, the law does not treat corporations like individuals but only as "legal persons" insofar as that fiction is needed to give the entity rights consistent with its nature. But those rights certainly must include some of the constitutional rights that are needed to prevent the entity from having its property arbitrarily confiscated or its premises arbitrarily searched, etc., and that is why the law has always recognized such rights on behalf of the fictional "persons" it protects. In other words, I think the law already does adapt the nature of the rights recognized to the nature of the "person" being protected and it is not therefore all or nothing (corporations cannot vote, for instance). In theory, this "legal-personhood" method of protecting corporate rights could be scrapped in favor of another that did not call them "persons" but I think this would be a distinction without a difference as the goal of the law would remain trying to accord rights to legally-sanctioned entities consistent with their nature and nothing more.

grellas 17y ago

For-profit corporations (and similar business entities) are sanctioned by law not just for limited liability purposes but also to facilitate business goals that arise when people want to associate for some sort of concerted action. Thus, a corporate format facilitates sophisticated ways by which people can own and do things through concerted efforts, by which they can transfer their ownership interests or borrow against them while putting them up as collateral, by which they can divide management from ownership such that an enterprise can be owned by broad numbers of passive investors while being managed by (supposedly) expert executives, etc. If corporations are so sanctioned, they must be given at least some enforceable rights by which they can legally protect and promote their interests (e.g., the right to sue). Were they denied such rights, then the only way, for example, that a corporate entity could sue to collect a debt would be for the lawsuit to be filed in the several names of the owners - a clearly unworkable way to proceed for any organization that becomes much more than a family-owned entity. Thus, the law creates what it clearly recognizes as a fiction and gives rights to the entities to act in their own names. The label put on this fiction is that of a "legal person" - that is, one that the law knows is not a living, breathing human being but that the law treats as having rights similar to those held by real individuals for the limited purposes for which this is needed. As it does this sort of thing, the law does not treat corporations like individuals but only as "legal persons" insofar as that fiction is needed to give the entity rights consistent with its nature. But those rights certainly must include some of the constitutional rights that are needed to prevent the entity from having its property arbitrarily confiscated or its premises arbitrarily searched, etc., and that is why the law has always recognized such rights on behalf of the fictional "persons" it protects. In other words, I think the law already does adapt the nature of the rights recognized to the nature of the "person" being protected and it is not therefore all or nothing (corporations cannot vote, for instance). In theory, this "legal-personhood" method of protecting corporate rights could be scrapped in favor of another that did not call them "persons" but I think this would be a distinction without a difference as the goal of the law would remain trying to accord rights to legally-sanctioned entities consistent with their nature and nothing more.