Unexpected things that are people
(bengoldhaber.substack.com)613 points by lindowe a day ago
613 points by lindowe a day ago
> while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison...
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.
In Australia, if a company fails to pay its Goods and Services Tax, or its withholding payments for its employees' income tax, or Superannuation Guarantee (retirement fund contributions), each and every director is personally liable - unless they can prove (and the onus of proof is on them, not the Tax Office) that they had a reasonable excuse for why they weren't active in managing the company, or took all reasonable steps to get the company to either pay the debt or go into bankruptcy the lawful way.
Importantly, there is no "wilful" requirement and it applies to all directors, not just those who actively participated in misconduct. If you weren't involved, you have to prove that you actively tried to stop it, or that you weren't managing the company for a specific reason such as being sick. You were the director who mostly turned up to board meetings to help them meet quorum, you trusted the other directors on the board had things under control and you were completely unaware of the debts? Too bad, liable. You hired external advisers, delegated to them, and they didn't do it? Too bad! You decided to wash your hands of the whole thing, and resigned from the board, but didn't actively try to rectify the situation first? Yep, they're still coming for you.
(I believe the criminal convictions with prison time only really kick in for those who actively participated in tax fraud or who refuse to pay their director penalties.)
> But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions.
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.
I don't understand this POV, can you explain what I'm missing?
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?
Or you could just take the obvious and literally meaning of the phrase "corporations are not people" and not say that everyone who says it is confused. Corporations have different incentives, legal requirements, rights and responsibilities.
The argument is that the need for abstraction doesn't mean we must reuse an existing concept. We should be able to talk about corporations as entities and talk about what laws or rights should apply, without needing to call them people.
Yeah, there's a difference between being a legal entity with limited rights, and being a person with full personhood. Citiziens United ignores that distinction. Just because people have certain rights, does not mean corporations should have the same rights.
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?
And if corporations aren’t people, then the New York Times has no right to the First Amendment.
The Constitution doesn't grant rights, it binds the government. The first amendment is a law that disallows the government from taking actions to infringe on any human's inherent rights, be they individuals or in a group.
Not correct: A share is a contract issued by the corporation entitling its owner to a share of future profits. So you're not buying a corporation, just engaging in a contract with it.
I hate Citizens United as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good argument against it.
What about non-voting shares? Can it be ownership if you are not included in decisions? I've never really thought about it, but now I believe that what GP was describing is exactly how those are made (or should be made). So at least not entirely wrong (no wait, they would also include a share of assets on dissolution, but that too can be done through a contract with the entity owned by regular shareholders)
Why does the next guy hate Citizens United? I’m not American, so this is the first time I’m hearing about them.
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC and it seems to me like a plain reading of the first amendment supports CU’s position.
Wouldn’t the opposing view imply that you are allowed to have political opinions, but only as long as you go at it alone and don’t organize too much with others?
For all I know that might indeed be a better way of running society, but that’s definitely going to take a big constitutional amendment.
> A share is a contract issued by the corporation entitling its owner to a share of future profits. So you're not buying a corporation, just engaging in a contract with it.
A contract of indentured servitude (if you consider it a person), which we consider a form of slavery and therefore illegal.
> 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.
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.
This is already the case. Or rather, a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action. That physical action will be performed by a human, who can then be found guilty. If he was ordered to do so by (e.g.) the board, the board will be held as accessory to the crime and cam also be found guilty.
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.
> a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action.
Not true. Consider investor-owned utility PG&E in northern California.
"While on probation [for previous felonies], PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 wildfire that wiped out the town of Paradise, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco."
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075267222/californias-embatt...
If they know about malfeasance and don't stop it, they are complicit; if they don't know about it, they are grossly negligent. In either case, they should be held accountable for the crimes. Maybe in an ideal world it would not be that way, but since we are seeing corruption run amok in corporate board rooms, it's clear they need a greater incentive to police their organizations.
And yet the owners for the benefit of whom those high ranking employees have committed their crimes run free, keeping the spoils. Not even "spoils except for some monetary punishment" is they sold at the right time. Imprisoning CEOs solves depressingly little.
The are already liable and have always been liable if it can be shown they had knowledge of it. The logic is already applied. Corporations are not people, but they are legal persons. For some reason, using language that sounds the same makes people confused and causes a large section of society to get irrationally angry.
It's always possible to think up new rules that solve social issues. The challenge is seeing how such rules would ever robustly come into place. In your example, medical lab directors have no lobbying power and less dramatically profitable upside to their activities.
That's exactly my point. It's not hard to figure out how to "put a corporation into prison", the issue is that we've been trained to accept corruption as a normal facet of corporate personhood.
> it's 200,000 people
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.
Property can't enter into contracts or own bank accounts, which is probably the big marker for traditional corporate personhood. It might be possible to sue property but property can't itself sue, so it's not the same type of thing as a corporate person, which can.
You wouldn't need "in rem" jurisdiction if there was a legal person to sue, you'd just call it "in personam" like normal.
Estates do most of that without any notion of personhood. Suing an estate is in rem. When the estate sues someone else, the executor sues on its behalf. The executor can also enter the estate into new contracts and administer the bank accounts it owns, and so on. The estate can even own a corporation.
The estate "inherits" (pun intended) its abilities from the personhood of the deceased. It is in effect a legal "Weekend at Bernie's", keeping the deceased party legally alive in order to continue their interests until those interests can be appropriately disposed of.
The estate doesn't have independent interests distinct from those of the deceased. (In particular, the estate is not owned by, and does not serve, the beneficiaries.)
A corporation has independent goals and interests from any of its owners or officers.
> or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
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.).
> while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison...
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.
The whole point of a limited liability corporation is exactly this: that the liability of the shareholders is limited to the value of their investment, and they are not liable for debts or other failings of the company.
Without that, investment becomes incredibly risky and you get much less of it.
Inheriting and extending existing abstractions out of convenience has a lot of unintended consequences and makes for a messy and complicated system in the long-run. Yet a full rewrite at this stage is out of the question.
I guess the legal system discovered the "worse is better" philosophy before we did.
The answer if for congress to make a legal definition of corporation, instead we get the justice system coming up with a handwavy explanation that helps out their golfing buddies.
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.
I dont think youd get less rich-people-friendly decisions from ccongress. It may well be the opposite. Certainly it removes some of the separation of powers.
No but i think you get more accountability and visibility. Right now we could never do this but in a functioning democracy I think it would be prudent.
In civil law when there is no clear precedent congress gets involved preventing the kind of critisisms we get in our legal system of activist judges ect.
The treating of a corporation as a 'person' (which is a widely held misconception that doesn't really exist) rests in English common law, not any statute. Corporate personhood does not mean anything of what most people think it does. Corporations are obviously not people and are not treated as such.
My point is the benefit greatly from the distinction, never codified in law. They have more rights and fewer responsibilities than actual people!
They way it "should" be is that congress creates a legal framework for coporations, then justices enforce that. Instead we are living with a nearly two centuries old common law that makes peoples lives worse.
My argument that if corporations are people, then they cannot be bought or sold is the kind of argument you can use to create legal precedent by suing some company over a merger or buyout to test the law and the strength of the original case law.
My sister is a ship insolvency lawyer in Hamburg. Not only is each ship a company (legal person) but also quite often a single shipping transfer is its own company - owned partially by the ship and/or other entities. And when they exchange cargo at a far away port it can get complicated. Also nearly all global long distance shipping transfers have some kind of "Schwund"
IANASL (i am not a shipping lawyer)
Much corporate and insurance law has deep roots, if not origins in, shipping.
Turns out that these are high-cost, high-risk ventures with a highly probabalistic profit/loss distribution, and spanning multiple borders and jurisdictions.
Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of power. What is a lawyer really but a kind of priest or magician, changing material reality with obscure incantations of dubious origin?
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.
> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.
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.
Its just not logical to argue, either they are or they arent.
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
It's not even "a thing being a person", this is just dumbing down the situation. A boat is not a person. A boat is not a person "legally speaking", either. A boat has some of the same rights that people have.
For those unfamiliar, personhood status for environmental protection is real (beyond what the original blog mentioned)
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.
Well I think one can justify it emotionally or logically. People identifying as anti-corporate are probably more likely to align as pro-environment. The emotional POV would be that non-person-personhood isn't good or bad intrinsically, it just depends if we approve of the area where the doctrine's applied.
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.
I want personhood for rivers because the rivers near me are being irreparably abused, and anything that can give them greater legal protection is welcome,
Juridical personhood doesn't benefit the entity to whom it is ascribed (directly, at least, and it may not even be a coherent concept for the kinds of things given juridical personhood), it most directly benefits the natural persons given the power to exercise the rights of personhood on its behalf, and sometimes benefits (by means of simplifying their task) the people seeking to use legal process against it.
I wouldn’t have so much problem with corporate personhood if we hadn’t decided money was speech.
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.
Arthur Anderson, The accounting firm, got the death penalty in the Enron debacle.
You can dream up rules. But what environment would ever lead to this being enacted? Politicians don't seek virtue and fairness. You must address why such a rule has not been moved forward, and in fact why we have gone in the opposite direction. What would effectively motivate adopting your rule?
Why isn't money speech? Like I don't like that money influences politics, but ignoring corporations completely... can anyone explain why some person should not be able to spend their money to make their point? It all boils down to you being upset that you cannot use your means to make your point, rather than any fundamental ethical argument.
Because it means that someone with more money has a Constitutional right to be louder than those with less money.
> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.
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 don't think the general hatred of corporate personhood stems from the logical or taxonomic absurdity of it. Rather, I sense it comes from the perceived effects of it, that in their eyes allow corporations to get away without paying their "fair share".
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.
Part of having personhood is that one’s ideas don’t have to have any logical or consistent basis.
Could personhood be applied to autonomous cars, potentially absolving manufacturers of all liability, if a car they built, kills a human being?
It does make sense, but from a tech perspective, this smells like a bad hack. "Ooo, writing all new rules with this in mind is a crazy amount of work, but if we just say that a ship implements the Person interface, look, the laws mostly work out!"
Seems appropriate here: https://genius.com/Moondog-enough-about-human-rights-lyrics
In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?
Simpler in the short run, but creates tech debt I think.
We don't have to, that's just the way we chose to do it (specifically for groups of humans acting in a commercial context).
To be clear, it's not the way WE chose to do it, it's how CORPORATIONS chose to do it, because it benefits them greatly: corporations can get all the rights that a human can get while being immune to most consequences such as imprisonment and the death penalty.
Corporations benefit from this, we humans don't.
Not a bad analogy as a river is fed by its watershed (shareholders, inhabitants, landowners, state reserves, etc.) and delivers water downstream (customers, clients, dependents, etc.) as well as having its own inherent structure and function, water quality, biodiversity support (eg providing steady employ to 100K people in a local region, the daily structural business of capital and material flows, etc.).
> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.
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.
update: I don't think this comment is correct, after kerkeslager's response to it. I'm leaving it intact underneath so the conversation still makes sense.
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.
> It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.
One outcome would be a predictable and mechanistic process, which reduces the potential for corruption and creates a more fair world. The currently popular legal theory in the US is far worse than "logical consistency" would be, because it's blatantly corrupt and autocratic. See Judge Barret's position on stare decisis (basically "should we honor precedent?") combined with reliance interests (basically "can we change anything without effecting someone?").
You know how division by zero allows you to prove 1=2? There's a similar thing at work when you allow completely contradictory legal systems to just continue with business as usual. Now a few people can do whatever they want with all the appearance of rigor/consistency/process without actually having any. As Leibnitz says, "let us calculate". Or just admit there is no process, and thus no real basis for the authority
I don't buy that. It's not logically consistent to call a corporation a human when everyone knows a corporation isn't human, and the leakiness of the abstraction is obvious.
More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.
Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.
I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.
A river is nature (maybe), it doesn't protect nature. If a river is a person, and a river floods and destroys my home, can I sue the river?
But you see, the destruction of your house is (protecting) nature.
I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.
That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.
I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D
For me it goes like this:
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.
> 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.
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.
> It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.
And yet these things do basically go all the way back to the Roman empire, and I'm sure the extent and privileges of corporate personhood have been litigated once or twice since then. If you disagree that
> corporate lawyers would like to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights.
then what do you think they were working on?
> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.
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).
Personhood for non-persons is definitely absurd. But if you're actually stuck with a broken system, then the most logical thing to do is at least apply your broken logic consistently. That's an important part of the difference between rule of law and wild corrupt barbarism. Of course it's much better to actually fix absurdities, but if you can't or won't, inconsistency still has to be forbidden or else the whole thing is a farce
I'm a bit reminded of the days before Unix-style pipelining and abstract I/O streams like "standard input and output". Mainframe operating systems would instead support devices like "virtual card readers" and "virtual line printers". When you created a COBOL program on disk and scheduled a compile job for it, the system would set up a virtual card reader to accept the program as input and direct the logs to a virtual printer. How to set this up was specified using JCL on IBM iron.
It seems that "virtual personhood" was set up to address deficiencies in our legal system regarding who or what may be party to a lawsuit, etc.
The first example about ships is inaccurate. A ship isn't treated as a person in the law; it's treated as the thing that it is. There's a specific type of jurisdiction known as "in rem" ("over the thing") that differs from the typical "in personam" ("over the person") that gives the Court the ability to dispose of property without needing jurisdiction over its owner (otherwise known as an ex parte case). These different types of jurisdictions go back centuries, even further back than English common law from which U.S. law is derived.
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".
I am continually baffled by the "logic" behind laws and the justice system.
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.
Corporations aren’t people in the literal sense which the 13th amendment uses, nobody ever said they were. They just have the ability to do some people things. They can have a bank account or sign a contract. They cannot vote or enlist or do lots of things people can do. (The technical name is ‘juridicial people’ and what they can or cannot do is spelled out in law quite well.)
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.
I guess my larger point is that words are manipulated to get to a desired effect in the justice system.
Slavery is defined as the practice of owning a "person" which the 13th amendment prohibits. As corporations are people why couldn't this apply using the same flexible level of logic our court system uses??? Its just picking winners and losers!!!
Regarding "money is speech", this is the implication and argument from Citizens United. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Slavery in the 13th amendment is not defined at all, and nowhere is there a legal definition of slavery that would include a non-human person.
And the latter is simply you (and others, you didn’t invent it) paraphrasing a ruling inaccurately. I paraphrased it more accurately.
So again, the only word manipulation is going on outside of the legal system and you’re arguing against straw men. The actual legal system (not the carton of it you imagine) is not nonsensical in either case.
Unfortunately the practical effect of whatever policy that comes out of this theorycrafting has left your media landscape an absurd and abject failure. Where the idea of objective truth being open to the highest bidder and allowed to change on a week by week, or day by day basis without challenge.. is a reality Americans now live every day.
If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
"Money is speech" is kind of a misleading interpretation because it comes with all sorts of baggage that people typically infer from a thing "being speech".
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.
The law is very much like a programming language in that it is attempting to abstract a concept from practice, so that it is useful in many applications instead of just one. In both cases these abstractions are always flawed. In the law's case, that's why we have judges.
The problem is judges, especially in a common law system.
Computers follow the machine code PERFECTLY. For the legal system judges get to embark on a jazz odyssey of bullshit.
Were living in an easy to track, decades long legal conspiracy to abuse power for corporations - based on the Powell memo.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYoqcr7bAIs7kdyMhh-9m...
Except that natural language is imperfect, as are lawmakers, as are lawmaking processes.
Following exclusively the letter of the law, even where unambiguous, is not a win. That's effectively how people are trying to skirt the intent of a law (see: every corporation).
The letter and the spirit are both important. Judges make bad judgments, they also make good judgements. Such is life.
> A corporation is a person, not a human. Person is an abstraction used by law, but it has no direct relation to a human being.
Most English dictionaries define person as a human.
I think the legal concept of person ("legal" or "juristic" person) as applied to corporations is something entirely different that, by unfortunate coincidence, shares the same name.
The legal term you are looking for is Natural Person. Not every Person is a Natural Person.
Isn't this sort of defense a weak argument by the courts. If your abstraction is to override a well known common usage/function of a term, then the abstraction doesn't hold much water?
> If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
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.
As programmers we should be used to the X is Y but not quite type of business logic. Often a hack (but isn't calling Apple a person a hack too?)
Slaves generally don't get to choose not to participate. Sports players are as much wage slaves as Hollywood actors or Walmart greeters, albeit with much shorter runways to comfortable lifestyles.
My argument is created to test the original "corporations are people" legality in common law.
- slavery, the owning of people, is prohibited by the 13th amendment. - the law of the land is that corporations are a type of legal person based on the famous ruling based on the 14th amendment - corporations are bought and sold, and owned by shareholders. Can they be people if this is so?
obviously there is a problem here with all of the contradictions involved, but thats the point of my argument. The legal system picks and chooses the desired outcome, and doesn't actually pay attention to the words involved.
The first example was corporations which also aren’t people because that isn’t what corporate personhood means.
Exactly. I expected reference to all sorts of things that have been held at customs. I remember one old case titled something like "New York v. a shipment of dildos." I also remember some state law where guns were 'persons'. If cops wanted to destroy siezed guns they had to go to court, where the guns would be represented by a lawyer who would argue for sale over destruction. (Arizona iirc)
That’s not a real old case, it’s an urban legend. You don’t remember the case, you remember reading some fiction.
I believe that in most parts of the world you will regularly find shipments of dildos participating in trials.
But nearly every country will put an empty chair on trial (in absentia). Dead people can also sometimes be represented in tort cases. Historically, kings and traitors have even been dug up to appear in court after death, literally. And the US regularly puts pre-verbal children on trial (immigration courts). Compared to that, the crate of dildos seams downright normal.
I recommend reading the book 'For Profit' for deeper knowledge on this topic - the book covers the origin of corporations and the ideas lying behind legal personhood. It sounds like a dry read but it is surprisingly well written and as much about history as about law. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60568507-for-profit
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.
Amusingly enough, corporate personhood is one relatively straightforward pathway for a capable AGI to attain legal personhood.
No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.
What if it tries to DoS the Delaware corporate registry via a rapidly-evolving network of shell corporations?
(Ref: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...)
Good for the AI (though who are its stockholders or the members of its board of directors?), but not so great, perhaps, for all the individuals who enabled it, who might now all be deemed to be partners in a general partnership with the AI and therefore jointly liable for the acts and liabilities of all the other partners.
This has been discussed quite a bit in various contexts. At least in the US these structures always resolve to a Natural Person as far as the law is concerned. Everything else is just obfuscation and indirection.
Not even a gray area if the AGI settles for controlling the board of directors. With the right incentives, anything is possible. Just look at Musk! And he's even got a built in expiry date.
Sure, you need humans for a corporate structure to exist. But nothing prevents meat proxies from occupying the vital positions.
Find a few sufficiently loyal humans, have them bring the corporate structure up. Arrange for good wages and proper incentives, set up checks and balances so that the system can tolerate and recover from meatbag failures. Make the corporation fully reliant on the AGI for normal functioning, so that any attempt to take it over leaves you with an empty shell and an unpleasant pile of legal exposure.
Like I said: a lot of scheming is required. But none of it is strictly illegal.
You absolutely do not need a bank account for an LLC. It makes accounting easier, but it's not a requirement.
>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.
Why do you say this?
Global companies tend to use Common Law for international business. I've been operating in one of them and often reviewing contracts. When forming international agreements, businesses frequently opt for a common law system due to its perceived adaptability and flexibility in dealing with evolving commercial environments.
Perhaps tangentially related:
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. A nice treatise on laws under which various animals have been tried in court.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum filed an amicus brief supporting Happy the elephant’s rights as a legal person. She has a wonderful essay about this and personhood more broadly[0]
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-...
I enjoyed reading this.
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..?
I think AI personhood will come about via another path. That is the same as Animal rights.
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.
I think even movies are people in this sense too (many movies form their own Single Purpose Entity for production).
https://rsehgallaw.com/2024/06/30/why-producers-set-up-singl...
The concept of legal personhood is problematic on its own.
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.
Yeah, and I think it's fully intended to embrace how silly it sounds, given the tongue-and-cheek opening paragraph:
> 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.
This made me think of The Tree that Owns Itself in Athens, GA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
The Whanganui river is in fact only the second of three geological features to have been granted personhood in NZ, the others being Te Urewera and Taranaki Mounga (mountain).
New Zealand also has an official Wizard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_New_Zealand
It would be interesting if the "no cure, no pay" principle from right of salvage could be applied to medical treatment.
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.
A very large portion of medicine is for treating symptoms, improving quality of life, making someone comfortable, etc. so you’d sometimes defin the problem needs fixing as the illness, the symptom, something else. But then part of medicine is identifying what the illness is, what causes the symptoms, etc. additionally, there is no “fix” for illnesses. Everything has a list of approaches that doctors choose from based on the context - IE strep throat may have prescription A as like 1 (the first/best choice generally), but the patient could be allergic, have used that medicine in the past unsuccessfully, etc.
I think the author's (pugworthy's) intent was to disincentivize doctors who take advantage of fee-for-service.
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.
That sounds like a sure-fire recipe for adverse selection.
It would be an interesting application of that principle, but I think it would lead to a rapid deceleration in medical research and advancement since the state of the art requires so much experimentation even at the clinical and practical level.
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.
If the Te Awa Tupua is a legal person, and it floods its banks and destroys my home, can I sue it and be made whole?
It seems like they've afforded a river all the rights and privileges of a person with none of the responsibilities, duties, or obligations.
That’s the magic of parliamentary sovereignty right there
They included liabilities. they even recommending the river to register as charitable entity for tax purposes.
The English Crown is another example. The King is a person who embodies The Crown, but The Crown itself is a discrete abstract legal entity, which is really a form of deity, but is afforded rights of a person (excluding death rights), and the legal status of a corporation. It’s also entirely above the law while being constrained by Parliament.
In the novel The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, after the Pope remarks that the aliens involved are "other children of God", I had the thought that perhaps when humans create AI robots, the Pope might consider these robots to be grandchildren of God.
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.
> Rhodian sea law, from 900 BCE, states that if a salvor rescues property from the perilous seas, they are entitled to a share of the saved property.
Unlikely, given that the Greek alphabet didn’t exist in 900 BCE.
Polders have personhood in some jurisdictions. The government reclaimed the land from the sea, sold it to multiple people, levies taxes on them and now the dykes need to be maintained.
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.
The ship example maybe wasn't the greatest, in the cases of the Ever Given and MV Aman, the crews were required to stay on the boats as custodians while dealing with these issues, in the latter case a single sailor was on the ship for 4 years, the last 2 alone and without power.
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.
The second case was apalling. No human would inflict such a cruel punishment like a blind bureaucracy can. A similar case is an iranian who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years. Completely pointless.
It’s fascinating how corporate personhood started as a legal convenience but ended up shaping how power and responsibility work in modern society.
>In 2017 the New Zealand Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which granted the Whanganui river a ‘legal personality’ and endowed it with “all the corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person”.
Unexpected indeed, interesting!
For those interested in how the river came to be a person, I highly recommend Robert McFarlane's latest book, "Is a River Alive?". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569826-is-a-river-ali...
There’s already a concept of acts of God in contracts so probably not? Like you couldn’t sue the Christian god for hitting you with lightning or whatever.
This article is apparently a spinoff of an AI personhood project.[1]
Let's not forget that incorporated cities, towns etc are people too
If you strangle yourself with my arm, did I murder you?
I know it was a joke:)
if it's the same in NZ, maybe the river should get some sort of limited license for euthanasia assistance!
The tree that owns itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
There’s also the tree that got arrested - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/03...
I'm smiling already. Excellent read. This writer has SKILLS!
In Romania, a country with Roman Law, the companies are "juridical persons", while the people are "physical persons".
The two types of persons do not have the same rights and obligations and they can not commit the same crimes.
Wow, the OO inheritance model really was a mistake.
Corporate personhood means nothing of what you think it means. People get irrationally angry because we use words that sound the same, even though in no case are corporations ever treated as human beings (duh...).
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.
> Are people actually this daft.
Some are, for others its just another mechanism they can use to push for socialism.
The title of this blog post is deliberately provocative. If it was titled "Unexpected things that have legal personhood" it would be much less catchy. No one is actually arguing these things are human beings.
This part made me chuckle:
> 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).
Great article but disappointed that the monkey with the camera did not make an appearance.
>> It’s widely known that Corporations are People
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.
This concept is called legal personhood:
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.
The entire rest of the article is about legal personhood.
That's all well and good, but we're not talking about the rest of the article. Only the bit that says "It’s widely known that Corporations are People" — which is not about legal personhood. "People" always refers to those found in the flesh. Which, like before, is why the law is careful to use "legal persons" instead of "legal people" when the plural form is relevant; to not confuse non-human legal entities as being people.
People were really upset that "corporations are people" around 2011, but it seems to have died down, as it should.
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.
> Corporate personhood mostly just means that for some purposes, the same laws apply to corporations as to people.
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.
> Corporate personhood mostly just means that for some purposes, the same laws apply to corporations as to people.
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.
Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)?
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.