Re: Corporations

[k hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Justin writes:


> This discussion is getting a bit off the rails.
> Corporations are not "legal fictions" -- they are
> legally created entities, no more or less real than
> contracts.  It is a strange species of "methodological
> individualism" to deny that they "really" exist merely
> because they are constituted out of indiviuals and
> their relations. What in the social world isn't? They
> are as real as nations and classes and races and
> governments and courts, etc.

I always thought that corporations were legal fictions. Legal fictions are
legally created entities aren't they? They may be more than this but they
certainly are not less. The problem is not claiming that corporations are
legal fictions but in claiming that as such they are not some separate
entity but a shorthand way of referring to interlocking contracts between
individuals the very point that you seem to be making. However your point
has nothing to do with corporations not being legal fictions.
>
>
> What Gene and others object to is two things, I think:
> not the legal device for limiting liability, but the
> fact that some corporations have vast wealth and power
> that distorts democracy and gives too much influence
> to a small number of people, and a legal system that
> treats these entities as if they were individual
> persons due the legal rights (like free speech) that
> are properaly accorded to individuals.  In most
> societies, even market societies, the latter is not
> true -- corporations are not "persons," as far as I
> knwo, under British law (any Brits out there who can
> correct me?), and anyway the Brits don't have a First
> Amendment.

>
But surely it is essential to treat corporations as having at least some of
the rights of individuals. Are you going to deny corporations the right to
own property, sign contracts, pay taxes, sue and be sued, all capacities of
individuals? Whether or not there is some special legal recognition of
corporations as persons any legal system will surely want to give
corporations rights such as these..

    And whether or not there is some separate legal definition of corporate
personhood, ordinary people are going to talk of corporations on analogy
with individuals and rightly so because there are definite similarities. The
analogy may be pushed too far and be inappropriate but that is another
issue.
   Of course for corporations to be persons under the law, the law must  say
that they are. But this is true of individuals too. There was a time when
women werent  persons and slaves were not either as far as their legal
status was concerned. To be an individual person does not entail being a
legal person.

Cheers, Ken Hanly