But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.
IANAL, but I believe in at least some scenarios, officer(s) of U.S. corporations can go to jail if they are responsible for the directing the corporation to commit certain offending actions (despite not physically doing it themselves). To be clear, I'm not just talking about personal liability for fraud, insider trading, etc they may have committed themselves.
A recent example might be when Adobe was fucking around repeatedly making it virtually impossible for users to cancel Creative Cloud subscriptions - despite having already agreed to do so. IIRC the Justice Department issued a warning if it wasn't fixed immediately, they'd prosecute the Executive Vice President responsible for the business unit. Their press release named the guy and emphasized the consequences for continued non-compliance could include that guy going to jail.
Absolutely - the legal abstraction is that corporations are corporations, not people. The article went with a lighter hearted quip but here's my own tired old one:
If corporations are people, then owning shares is unconstitutional as that would be a form of slavery.
Usually when people say "corporations aren't people" I think they are confused about the need for an abstraction. But you acknowledged the need for an abstraction.
I don't imagine you are confused about the status quo of the legal terminology? AFAIK, the current facts are: the legal term "person" encompasses "natural person" (ie the common meaning of "person") and "legal person" (ie the common usage of "corporation"). In legalese, owning shares of legal persons is not slavery; owning shares of natural persons is; owning shares of "people" is ambiguous.
I don't imagine you are advocating for a change in legal terminology. It seems like it would be an outrageously painful find-and-replace in the largest codebase ever? And for what upside? It's like some non-programmer advocating to abandon the use of the word "master" in git, but literally a billion times worse.
Are you are just gesturing at a broader political agenda about reducing corporate power? Or something else I am not picking up on?
It's an artificial legal construct, and its rights and obligations should be entirely subject to whatever society finds beneficial to the real people of that society.
Your slavery argument is an excellent argument. If corporations supposedly have the right to the same free speech as a person, shouldn't they also be free from the bondage of owners, i.e. shareholders?
I hate Citizens United as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good argument against it.
There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.
The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.
Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.
You wouldn't need "in rem" jurisdiction if there was a legal person to sue, you'd just call it "in personam" like normal.
I suspect we can, and I know we should make corporations not have ALL of the same rights as a citizen. The first thing that comes to mind is barring them from political donations. It would also be great if their “free speech” didn’t extend to being able to censor legal content they don’t like or to payment and Internet infrastructure providers being able to cut off service to sites with legal content they don’t like(porn, certain politics, hateful content, etc.).
I think a lot of objections are really about scale. Corporate structure solves a lot of coordination problems; the other widely used structure, partnership, scales much less well. Partnership structured businesses tend to be small (exception: John Lewis and Partners, a UK retailer with over 80,000 partners).
Most of the objections to corporations are really the same as objections to the hyper-wealthy, where the corporation effectively acts as a sock puppet for the personal views of its management. Citizens United is just a symptom of that. The use of the WaPo as a personal mouthpiece for Bezos is another, but not really affected by the ruling.
There are lots of ways out of that if America wanted, but there's significant factions which don't because they want the status quo or a more regressive version. See all the Voting Rights Act litigation.
It would be interesting if there were some tangible way to prevent the company from performing operations for some period of time.
I don't think this is viable or even necessarily a good idea, but the concept that "Meta illegally collected user data in this way" means they cannot operate for 5 years. It would probably involve large deconstruction of megacorps into "independent" entities so when one does something bad, it only affects a small portion of the overall business. Almost introducing a concept of "families" to the corporate world.
But the rabbit hole is odd. Should (share)holders be complicit too, as they are partial owners? I think not.
Corporate entities and laws governing them are definitely weird.
I guess the legal system discovered the "worse is better" philosophy before we did.
The answer is to get rid of the common law justice system and codify laws in congress like a civil law system. That way you dont get rich people trying to buy favors or "tip" judges.
IANASL (i am not a shipping lawyer)
Turns out that these are high-cost, high-risk ventures with a highly probabalistic profit/loss distribution, and spanning multiple borders and jurisdictions.
Found one.
Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.
Only if/because they are reading too much into the concept of legal personhood. A thing being a person doesn't mean the thing is equivalent to a human or that it has every right that every human has. It generally just means that the law attributes certain rights and obligations to that thing because that is more convenient than finding the right human(s) to attribute them to in the circumstances.
For instance, corporations can be bought or sold, but people cannot per the 13th amendment.
Help me understand how these inconsistent principles are allowed in the supposedly rigorous logic of the legal system
NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8
Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...
I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.
Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.
The more logical reason is that if corporate personhood sucks and we have it anyway, then like it or not, now we need to extend it elsewhere just to level the playing field. If anti-environmental interests can hide behind it as a justification that makes their fight easier, then let the environmental interests do the same thing.
Plus, if corporations get to be people for all the good stuff, it should require taking the bad bits too. E.g. capital punishment should be on the table.
Isn't it, though? If a corporation was found guilty of murder I wouldn't be surprised for a court to order it dissolved.
I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.
I think it's an instrument of convenience that has predictably resulted in a lot of legal tech-debt, which is largely inevitable because of how slow we are at adapting laws to our lived realities.
Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.
Don't forget that one. All the rights, none of the responsibility.
Ok if we are already extending personhood to corporations, who with their sheer power transcend individuals, why not also extend that fiction to other entities that would actually need active protection?
Wouldn't corporations do just fine and we would live in a better world if we stripped any form of personhood from corporations? The biggest collision area stemming from corporate personhood is its collision with other, actual persons. The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights. Thus watering down the existing right.
Not at all. It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits. Without legal personhood it could do none of these.
Straw man argument.
I'm for regulating different things differently and as what they are: a corporation should be regulated as a corporation and a river should be regulated as a river.
People on here almost universally value logical consistency over beneficial outcomes. By the HN moral consensus a rule that can be applied to all situations without modification is a good rule. It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.
Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are not the same thing.
In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?
Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'.
Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).
This leads to amusing case names, like "United States v. 422 Casks of Wine" and "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in the Form of a Rooster".
If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
How can money be speech, if the constitution allows congress to regulate commerce, but prohibits it from abridging speech.
It just seems like in a common law system we're forced to live with half-assed arguments that corporate lawyers dreamed up while golfing with the judges.
Money isn’t speech, and no court ever said it was. The ads you buy with money are speech. What’s the difference between a Fox news editorial show or a right-leaning ad on Fox News? (The answer: who pays for it.) If news organizations are just things owned by people, what makes them more worthy of expressing opinions than other things owned by people? Just because they have “news” in their name?
You just think they’re half-assed because you have the cartoony idea of what they are expressed by media that doesn’t like them. They’re quite sensible.
Phrased another way: the argument is that limiting one's ability to spend is practically a limitation on their speech (or their ability to reach an audience, which is an important part of speech). If some president can preclude you from buying billboards, or web servers, or soapboxes on which to stand: he has a pretty strong chokehold on your ability to disseminate a political message.
I'm not defending that argument, only saying what it is as I understand it.
We simply pass a law saying that the act of incorporating a company is, among other things, punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and the 13th amendment problems go away.
Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is distinct.
Sports players are people, but their service is bought and sold by teams. Is that slavery, too?
Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.
Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.
No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.
(Ref: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...)
That's not even close to be true, except for former and present English colonies. Most of the world follows civil law that itself follows Roman law.
Why do you say this?
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. A nice treatise on laws under which various animals have been tried in court.
It seems like there are judges in the US who are sympathetic to the argument that elephants are clearly persons with consciousness, desires, suffering, etc. but that the ramifications of declaring them as such would be too chaotic.
One day.
[0]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-...
> It’s not clear to me how a specific next friend is established - what if the god has a lot of friends?
reminded me of Pratchett's Small Gods. If you needed a random book recommendation, this is it.
If we think about applicability to AI (as the footnote suggests was on the authors mind)… I found myself thinking about the motivations and incentives that existed at the time, to understand why.
Ships - my read is that major naval powers essentially reduced the downside to owners of ships (making them responsible) while giving the owners salvage rights (“curing” the problem of a wreck which may be an impediment to the passage). That seems to make sense if you put your “I’m a shipowner” hat on. Balanced by the governments also saying if your ship sunk and someone else recovers it, they get some cut bc hey, you didn’t recover it.
And the others seem largely about modern governments appeasing religious and indigenous groups. And it’s interesting that this acknowledgement seems to be part of a broader solution (Trust, ongoing governance etc)
The first seems more financially motivated (capping downside and clearing shipwrecks). The latter seems more about protecting a natural resource/asset.
So then you think about who is leading AI and what their incentives may be… Convenient that we do have modern companies that limit liability, do you just use that structure (as they are) or do they seek to go further and say this Agent or LLM is its own thing, as as a company I’m not responsible for it.
maybe that is convenient for the companies, and the gov in the countries leading the charge…? Looks more like ships than rivers..?
We humans in general, suffer, when we perceive animals suffering. Its an entirely emotional response. Humans are developing emotional attachments to LLMs. It follows, to an extent, that people will try and shore up the rights of LLMs simply to assuage their emotions. It doesnt actually matter whether or not it can feel pain, but whether it can express pain in a way that causes a sympathetic emotion in a person.
> It’s widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding.
It reminds me of that episode of Community where Subway enrolled a person who they hired to legally represent their corporate entity so that they could open a shop on campus without violating the school's rule that only student-run businesses were allowed.
The two types of persons do not have the same rights and obligations and they can not commit the same crimes.
Something like this...
> The "no cure, no pay" principle is a fundamental concept in medical law where a doctor (the party assisting a human in health danger) is only entitled to a reward if the healing operation is successful in saving the person or part of person (life, limb, sight, hearing, etc.). If the operation fails, the doctor receives no payment, regardless of the effort or expense incurred.
Research institutions and universities would dramatically reduce the amount of testing they're doing if they can't get any compensation for the shit they're throwing at the wall.
For example, a few years ago, I started getting Plantar Faucitis. (Basically, foot pain that happens in middle age.) My doctor sent me to a podiatrist, who basically told me to buy new shoes, use inserts, and stop walking around barefoot. That worked, BUT:
The podiatrist also pushed me to do a silicon injection (as in they offered it while they were pulling out the needle and pushing it into my foot), pressured me to come in monthly, and wanted to write a prescription for a painkiller that I didn't need and had side effects. It was clear they were trying to increase their patient load and services as a way to get more revenue.
https://rsehgallaw.com/2024/06/30/why-producers-set-up-singl...
The law cannot take a concept and add "legal" to it, to expand its definition. it should simply define a new term that has no relationship with the former.
Instead of updating laws to adapt to entities that require legislation, they instead chose to expand the meaning of what a person is, so that the protections of a person also applies to that entity, but not always. What a twisted and crooked thing the law is sometimes.
A law that contradicts reality or logic is invalid. But we don't follow laws because of their validity, so that is irrelevant. Except for the problem of the legal system's legitimacy, and the public's trust in it.
If a corporation, a ship or some other entity requires legal protections or if legal responsibilities should be placed on it, specific law should be passed to that effect.
I don't need to go on about the cancerous effect corporate personhood has had in the US in recent years to make a point, but the root cause is legislative laziness. If there are 100000 laws that involve a person, lawmakers are obliged to review every single one of them, determine which ones apply to a company and update those laws, or pass new ones as applicable.
For example, there is no reason for corporations being allowed to participate in politics (US), because they don't get to vote and the government derives its powers explicitly from individuals. But the crooked and twisted nature of the law is such that the lazy expansionism of the term "person" created this gray area where corporations can benefit from personhood but avoid its obligations since they're only a "legal" person. It leaves lots of room for interpretation, reverting governance to the whims of individual rulers (judges) instead of the rule of law. And that way, the law commits suicide.
It seems like they've afforded a river all the rights and privileges of a person with none of the responsibilities, duties, or obligations.
I'm not trying to drag religion into this, despite my obviously doing so on the surface.
I am trying to see where certain flexibilities might be found, since there seems to be some flexibility on personhood in law.
Another interesting case with ships is the Trieste and several other Russian oligarch mega yachts being held in Italy. Italian law requires them to maintain the value of frozen assets, so they are spending millions per month to keep these yachts maintained.
Required by whom? Local legal bodies or maritime agreements?
Does that mean I can sue it for flooding my property?
This is just legal fiction, technology developed and applied cross industry.
The mere concept of water rights implies obligations must lie someplace. All this talk about reified gods takes away much of how mundane the concept is.
But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
Unexpected indeed, interesting!
Unlikely, given that the Greek alphabet didn’t exist in 900 BCE.
(joke)
So if the Whanganui river floods well beyond its expected banks and ruins my property, can I sue it?
> Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
Which would seem to be yes. If the river damages your property, you should be able to seek redress through the courts.
What if we make that god a legal person?
We might as well call it 'subjecthood'. Corporate personhood means a corporation can be the subject of a legal dispute or action. Trivially, corporations have basically no personal rights. All the 'cases', in which corporations have been 'found' to have human rights is because a corporation is made up of people who retain their natural rights no matter how they associate. Corporations are never treated as actual living beings. Are people actually this daft.
Some are, for others its just another mechanism they can use to push for socialism.
Anyway, I'd be surprised if AI didn't gain some kind of legal status with some kind of limited personhood, if corporations and ships can be.
If someone drowns in the river, can the river be convicted of murder?
> the legal rights of the divine most often come up when land is contested between different faiths and sects (Hindus and Muslims, the Maori and Industry).
Really? Businesses and governments can be legal entities, and legal entities need not be people.
In case of Hindu deities, temples have properties, just like how the Crown has properties in England. A temple property is usually managed by a Trust, but the property is considered to belong to the deity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
When it's not a natural person (ie, a human being) it's called a juridical person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person
"Person" is in this usage a piece of legal jargon.
There is no usage of "Person" here. It says "People". The plural of "legal person" is "legal persons", so clearly nobody is talking about that.
Corporate personhood mostly just means that for some purposes, the same laws apply to corporations as to people. You can think of it as code reuse.
There is also the argument that corporations are groups of people. A way for people to organize activities under a system of laws. Which is mostly true.
In my experience, almost no-one is truly upset about the "corporations are people" idea in isolation. The upset stems from the combination of "corporations are people", "people have a right to free speech", and "political donations are speech", which in effect meant "corporations can make unlimited political donations". If there was a system that categorized political donations as a form of speech that could be limited, 95% of the issue would go away.
No, it also means that corporations are protected in ways that were only ever meant to apply to people. Think of it as a failure of separating concerns - one function doing too many things. Every time we pass a law that's intended to apply to people, we have to think of corporations.
