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The Atlantic should be ashamed of this headline. Winkler's essay in the Saturday WSJ on this same topic says this: "Corporate personhood is a foundational prin

by Digory 9y ago

The Atlantic should be ashamed of this headline. Winkler's essay in the Saturday WSJ on this same topic says this: "Corporate personhood is a foundational principle of business law. In 1757, Blackstone in his influential 'Commentaries on the Law of England' wrote that corporations were 'artificial persons.' Open any corporate law casebook and one of the first lessons will be that corporations are legal persons." [0] So, "Corporations are People" isn't a new idea, is much older than the 19th Century, and Winkler himself says otherwise. [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-rights-should-corporations-have-1519919444 https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-rights-should-corporations...

woodandsteel 9y ago
No, the point of calling them "artificial persons" is that they lack many of the rights, such as freedom of speech, that real persons have. It also means they cannot, like real persons, be sent to jail.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Legal corporate personhood is exactly the original differentiating factor of the corporate form vs. other business structures (which basically consisted of sole proprietorships and general partnerships at the time, most other forms are newer inventions than the corporation.) That said, Constitutional corporate personhood is a distinct thing; it is quite possible for legal corporate personhood to be observed without the protections granted to “the people” or “persons” in the Constitution being extended to private corporations (they generally are not extended to juridical/artificial persons which are not private corporations, such as public bodies, despite those bodies also being legal persons.) The contentious issue about “corporate personhood” is about Constitutional, rather than juridical, corporate personhood. So while you (and the WSJ article you cite) are correct about legal corporate personhood, that's also a bit of a non-sequitur and equivocation in the discussion at hand. (Though it would help if articles like the Atlantic one would expressly identify Constitutional personhood as the issue and contrast it with juridical personhood, so as to clarify the problem domain and forestall this kind of distraction.)

by Digory 9y ago

woodandsteel 9y ago

No, the point of calling them "artificial persons" is that they lack many of the rights, such as freedom of speech, that real persons have. It also means they cannot, like real persons, be sent to jail.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Legal corporate personhood is exactly the original differentiating factor of the corporate form vs. other business structures (which basically consisted of sole proprietorships and general partnerships at the time, most other forms are newer inventions than the corporation.) That said, Constitutional corporate personhood is a distinct thing; it is quite possible for legal corporate personhood to be observed without the protections granted to “the people” or “persons” in the Constitution being extended to private corporations (they generally are not extended to juridical/artificial persons which are not private corporations, such as public bodies, despite those bodies also being legal persons.) The contentious issue about “corporate personhood” is about Constitutional, rather than juridical, corporate personhood. So while you (and the WSJ article you cite) are correct about legal corporate personhood, that's also a bit of a non-sequitur and equivocation in the discussion at hand. (Though it would help if articles like the Atlantic one would expressly identify Constitutional personhood as the issue and contrast it with juridical personhood, so as to clarify the problem domain and forestall this kind of distraction.)