Comment by otterley

Comment by otterley 21 hours ago

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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".

mkehrt 21 hours ago

United States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque

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otterdude 21 hours ago

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.

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  • mattmaroon 20 hours ago

    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.

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    • otterdude 20 hours ago

      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...

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      • mattmaroon 19 hours ago

        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.

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    • kannanvijayan 20 hours ago

      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?

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      • mattmaroon 19 hours ago

        Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. The opposite of our media landscape is countries that think they have free speech but really don’t, like most of Europe.

        I’ll take having all the information in the world (true or false, purposefully curated for propaganda or organically reported) over any society that locks people up for social media posts deemed “fake”.

        I have faith both in the marketplace of ideas leading to the best outcomes, and that the ability to lock people up over false speech will be weaponized eventually.

        The American media landscape is the only possible result of true freedom of speech combined with the internet. It’s faaaaar from perfect but I do believe it’ll be the best in the end.

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  • niam 20 hours ago

    "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.

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    • otterdude 20 hours ago

      My arguments are as bad-faith as the arguments that lead to corporate personhood and citizens united. Fight fire with fire.

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  • wmeredith 21 hours ago

    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.

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    • otterdude 21 hours ago

      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...

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      • saintfire 20 hours ago

        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.

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  • coliveira 21 hours ago

    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.

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    • dheera 20 hours ago

      The law has lots of weird terminology. For example they have "exhibits" that are really just some crappy figures in an appendix of someone doing something bad, and not actual exhibits that you can buy tickets to visit.

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    • the_af 20 hours ago

      > 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.

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    • otterdude 20 hours ago

      The definition for person is "a living human".

      This argument is just ridiculous, a corporation is a corporation. That contains subsets of people who have rights (shareholders, employees).

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      • jandrewrogers 20 hours ago

        The legal term you are looking for is Natural Person. Not every Person is a Natural Person.

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    • cuttothechase 20 hours ago

      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?

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  • returningfory2 21 hours ago

    > 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.

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  • [removed] 19 hours ago
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  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 20 hours ago

    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?)

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  • themafia 19 hours ago

    > If corporations are people,

    Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is distinct.

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  • toast0 20 hours ago

    > If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?

    Sports players are people, but their service is bought and sold by teams. Is that slavery, too?

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    • Supermancho 20 hours ago

      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.

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      • otterdude 19 hours ago

        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.

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mattmaroon 21 hours ago

The first example was corporations which also aren’t people because that isn’t what corporate personhood means.

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sandworm101 21 hours ago

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)

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  • mattmaroon 20 hours ago

    That’s not a real old case, it’s an urban legend. You don’t remember the case, you remember reading some fiction.

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  • inglor_cz 21 hours ago

    In most of the world, "a shipment of dildos" cannot be a participant of a trial, this is a US curiosity.

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    • MengerSponge 21 hours ago

      I believe that in most parts of the world you will regularly find shipments of dildos participating in trials.

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      • gsf_emergency_4 13 hours ago

        Totally OT but I just saw your force diagram question.

        The force diagrams I came up with have "invaginated arrows".

        In the std diagram students get confused about what forces act on which objects so the invaginated arrows trip them up just enough to make them figure out the right orientation on their own ..

        If you press me, I'd say these are nothing more than UX trials..

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    • sandworm101 21 hours ago

      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.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

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  • westmeal 21 hours ago

    Damn dildos get more representation than me.

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