It seems to me from my reading of this that the key specific question is about the unique issues that are raised by perpetuity and un-amendability. I'm sorry if

It seems to me from my reading of this that the key specific question is about the unique issues that are raised by perpetuity and un-amendability. I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but doesn't that result in a different twist on the examples you give? >Companies and other organizations are sometimes bound by contracts that have only been agreed to by people that are now dead. Is that an argument for not allowing a company to be a party to a contract? Or do we say that a company is a legal person for that purpose, and so since that "person" persists, so should their contractual obligations? Right but the legal entity making the contract is not dead, and further contracts in perpetuity are commonly unenforceable. In California for example if the contract lacks language on an express or implied fixed term, courts take that to mean it's terminable at will at any time by any party. And other states consider perpetual contracts to flat out violate public policy and thus be completely unenforceable (note this is different from auto-renew-by-default "evergreen" contracts which are totally kosher, any party can simply choose to actively non-renew). And contracts are not inviolable, there just are consequences for doing so. And the entity is "living" so to speak and may amend itself and adapt to a changing world. >I hear the U.S. Constitution described as a social contract. Should it be relevant (as Lysander Spooner believed) that all of the signatories to that contract are dead? Or does democracy nullify the principle? If the last legislator who voted for a law dies, should it have any affect on the law? This seems to really be stretching the point too far. "Social contract" is not some fixed legal meaning at all, I think you're getting into silly levels of abstractionism. Polities are self-perpetuating in ways more basic of legal entities existing within them. And to the point, they're also endlessly amendable by definition and by society at large, not fixed in time by an individual. >With a philanthropy, maybe the solution is to simply transfer ownership to the trustees, who then have the power to amend their own charter as they wish, breaking any hold by a dead hand. That seems like one possible way to bring things into line with normal corporations and such, though there are others. It's definitely a very interesting question though, to consider to what extent any polity should allow and support the creation of perpetual static legal constructs within it, particularly in a democracy. I'm not immediately fully convinced by the article, but I also feel like it's true it's become a recent unquestioned consensus without any modern debate or reflection, and that it deserves such debate on principle.