This never made sense to me. Personhood should be reserved for persons.
Instead of contorting language and law into pretzels, make new law to conserve nature.
A river is not a person. A corporation is not a person.
Instead of contorting language and law into pretzels, make new law to conserve nature.
A river is not a person. A corporation is not a person.
Ah, but you'll say, the law should recognize a distinction between humans and corporations! It does. Corporate personhood is nothing more than a way of talking about the rights, privileges, and obligations, which corporations share with humans. When push comes to shove, the fiction is dispensed with, this is called "piercing the corporate veil"[0], terminology which shows that this is understood to be reasoning by analogy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
Which raises the question, should a collection of people have different rights than the members of said collection?
A person can hold up a sign, but can two people hold up a sign together.
It's complicated and difficult to draw the lines and impossible to do it perfectly. But if Elon Musk wants to blow an entire fortune for the lulz, that's kind of up to him. And we shouldn't stop him.
Imagine if, say, the New York Times Coporation wasn’t a person.
It couldn’t own property. Or enter into contracts. So no office building, unless one of the investors had a property they cared to rent to individual officers or employees.
Coworking for everybody, basically.
Salaries would be paid from the private accounts of individual investors. As would all expenses.
If an investor ran low on funds, they would have to be replaced, quickly.
All employees would be the personal servants of the executive officer, although their contracts would make clear they must serve the organization as a whole.
Some industries can function like this.
Maritime insurance functioned without incorporation for centuries.
Even today Lloyd’s of London has some “names” which are personally liable, with no corporate veil between themselves and liability.
But businesses like the New York Times Corporation can’t operate that way.
Rivers being people is silly though.