4 ms·

I don't think there is any serious controversy about corporate personhood in the US. Plenty of unserious, ignorant shouting, though

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
There is plenty of serious controversy about it. Should corporations be capable of holding religious conviction? Various evangelical Christian business owners and a number of conservative judges say "of course". Plenty of other serious, well-informed people say, in relatively quite voices, "absolutely not". Should a corporation organized for the purpose of making a profit be permitted to freely spend on political campaigns? SCOTUS thought yes, plenty of other people think not (even if they would allow non-profit corporations to do so). Plenty more like that.
ghaff 4y ago
There are reasonable criticisms of Citizens United around limiting spending of corporate money directly related to politics. However, the lazy "corporate personhood" putdown is mostly silly. Obviously there are and have long been many ways in which corporations, trade associations, LLPs, etc. effectively act as a person for mostly good reasons. Barring criminal acts, you really don't want people suing a company for some action to instead identify all the individuals who were involved in some decision and go after them personally.
- saghm 4y ago
  > Barring criminal acts, you really don't want people suing a company for some action to instead identify all the individuals who were involved in some decision and go after them personally. You've inadvertently touched upon the thing I find most confusing about the concept of "corporate personhood", which is that they aren't treated anything like people when it comes to crimes. You might argue this makes sense, since they can't become citizens or vote either, but at that point I have to wonder why "corporations are people" is a more reasonable way to define things than just saying that some (but not all) things people do can also be done by corporations (like owning property, etc.). It makes as much sense to me as arguing that we should just define bats as birds because most animals that fly are birds, and it would be easier to just make "flying" only apply to birds instead of just saying it's a thing that non-birds can do as well.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >a more reasonable way to define things than just saying that some (but not all) things people do can also be done by corporations (like owning property, etc.) I think that's the general state of affairs. A corporation can send out a press release the claims in which are not all on the PR person identified at the bottom. Absent criminal malfeasance, a CFO isn't personally on the hook for a contract that the company can't meet. An individual developer can't generally be sued by a customer for a big in their code. But people who didn't like the Citizens United decision rally around the corporate personhood flag even though, of course, corporations and other entities take collective actions that aren't always about individual responsibility.
    - saghm 4y ago
      > I think that's the general state of affairs. Functionally, yes, it's the same. My complaint is that I think the way it's described is way less intuitive than it could be, which is at least partially responsible for it being viewed as controversial. Of course saying "a corporation is person, just a different kind" is a more confusing than just saying "corporations are not people, but they're allowed to do some things people are"; the former makes the legal term "person" directly conflict with the common non-legal usage of the word, whereas the latter is consistent with it without actually changing things legally. Maybe the law _is_ defined like that, and the idea of "corporate personhood" is just an informal term, but if that's the case, it should be even easier for people to stop trying to convince doubters that it makes sense instead of just trying to find more intuitive language to describe the concept. I'm not even convinced there _needs_ to be a term because it's not really that confusing of a concept; nobody needed to declare animals as "zoological persons" to make it illegal to poach via murder statutes.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

There is plenty of serious controversy about it. Should corporations be capable of holding religious conviction? Various evangelical Christian business owners and a number of conservative judges say "of course". Plenty of other serious, well-informed people say, in relatively quite voices, "absolutely not". Should a corporation organized for the purpose of making a profit be permitted to freely spend on political campaigns? SCOTUS thought yes, plenty of other people think not (even if they would allow non-profit corporations to do so). Plenty more like that.

ghaff 4y ago

There are reasonable criticisms of Citizens United around limiting spending of corporate money directly related to politics. However, the lazy "corporate personhood" putdown is mostly silly. Obviously there are and have long been many ways in which corporations, trade associations, LLPs, etc. effectively act as a person for mostly good reasons. Barring criminal acts, you really don't want people suing a company for some action to instead identify all the individuals who were involved in some decision and go after them personally.

saghm 4y ago
> Barring criminal acts, you really don't want people suing a company for some action to instead identify all the individuals who were involved in some decision and go after them personally. You've inadvertently touched upon the thing I find most confusing about the concept of "corporate personhood", which is that they aren't treated anything like people when it comes to crimes. You might argue this makes sense, since they can't become citizens or vote either, but at that point I have to wonder why "corporations are people" is a more reasonable way to define things than just saying that some (but not all) things people do can also be done by corporations (like owning property, etc.). It makes as much sense to me as arguing that we should just define bats as birds because most animals that fly are birds, and it would be easier to just make "flying" only apply to birds instead of just saying it's a thing that non-birds can do as well.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >a more reasonable way to define things than just saying that some (but not all) things people do can also be done by corporations (like owning property, etc.) I think that's the general state of affairs. A corporation can send out a press release the claims in which are not all on the PR person identified at the bottom. Absent criminal malfeasance, a CFO isn't personally on the hook for a contract that the company can't meet. An individual developer can't generally be sued by a customer for a big in their code. But people who didn't like the Citizens United decision rally around the corporate personhood flag even though, of course, corporations and other entities take collective actions that aren't always about individual responsibility.
  - saghm 4y ago
    > I think that's the general state of affairs. Functionally, yes, it's the same. My complaint is that I think the way it's described is way less intuitive than it could be, which is at least partially responsible for it being viewed as controversial. Of course saying "a corporation is person, just a different kind" is a more confusing than just saying "corporations are not people, but they're allowed to do some things people are"; the former makes the legal term "person" directly conflict with the common non-legal usage of the word, whereas the latter is consistent with it without actually changing things legally. Maybe the law _is_ defined like that, and the idea of "corporate personhood" is just an informal term, but if that's the case, it should be even easier for people to stop trying to convince doubters that it makes sense instead of just trying to find more intuitive language to describe the concept. I'm not even convinced there _needs_ to be a term because it's not really that confusing of a concept; nobody needed to declare animals as "zoological persons" to make it illegal to poach via murder statutes.