Notable claim from part of that link: corporations are persons, but cannot be sued like a person can.
I assume the portion of the first link you're referring to is the section that starts
> Courts have also split on whether corporations may be held liable under the ATS.
This is a question about the ATS and its scope specifically; the source is not discussing the nature of corporations generally.
It sounds like the scope of the ATS is fairly ill-defined, and that at various points courts have looked for whatever reasons they could to limit its scope, and whether a corporation was involved has just been one of those reasons.
Yes. Just like Californians, non-Americans and children are all natural persons with varying rights, Delaware C corporations, New York non-profits and unions are all legal persons with different rights.
Fictitious personhood is older than childhood personhood (or universal natural personhood, for that matter). To the degree we need a better term, it’s for natural persons.
It’s a logical consequence of assembly, tracing back thousands of years to trade guilds and municipalities needing the ability to stand in court as a collective.
Anyone who thinks we should end it should consider the consequences of requiring a find-and-replace exercise across our entire body of law, specifying which persons each statute and case applies to, and then prepare for an endless game of whack-a-mole as new categories of person are created. (Murder is legal if you’re a DAO!)
individual natural persons are implementing every act of these artificial hyperagents, and there is precedent and reason for holding individuals accountable for individual actions.
It's linguistics. Corporations were people in English before many folks of darker skin colour.
(OP argued the use is abusive. That is wrong. The term wasn't manipulated. Our world got kinder faster than our English.)
> individual natural persons are implementing every act of these artificial hyperagents
With responsibility comes power. (See: Tiberius.) If the CEO is entirely responsible for their corporation, then they are king. We've derived feudalism.
Etymonline[0] cites phrases like "person corporate" as linguistic precedent this use of the term, but the meaning "individual, human being" goes back to 1200. Legal rights notwithstanding, I don't think you're at all correct if you are suggesting that there was ever a stage of daily English usage where the word would be used to refer equally to free citizens and corporations, but not to slaves. And I'd certainly argue that today, the idea that a corporation can be referred to as a 'person' is very much a specialists' usage that does not at all align with its everyday use.
Corporate personhood, and the referring of entities as persons, goes back to ancient Latin and multiple Indian languages for a reason: it’s a natural consequence of (a) collective rights and (b) polytheistic vesting, whereby “personhood” was understood in a broader context than even today [1]. (See: any spiritual practice that vests inanimate objects with a will and thus, in a sense or directly, personhood.)
> certainly argue that today, the idea that a corporation can be referred to as a 'person' is very much a specialists' usage
Agree. But that doesn’t make it wrong. When you look at why it has that specialist usage, suspending the use makes zero sense. (It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate its use.)
[1] https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-briti...
> Anyone who thinks we should end it should consider the consequences of requiring a find-and-replace exercise across our entire body of law, specifying which persons each statute and case applies to, and then prepare for an endless game of whack-a-mole as new categories of person are created.
I don't have much hope for fixing our body of laws, frankly. I don't think a good reaction to this realization is to accept them as rational or reasonable.
Your problem isn't with corporate personhood. It's with our quasi-aristocracy.
To that extent, complaining about legal entities is entirely a distraction. (Akin to how "corporate death penalties" distract from proportional fining. Red herrings littering the path.)
> don't have much hope for fixing our body of laws, frankly
Have you studied them? They're precedented in millenia, not tweets, for good reason.
Thinking about the law in this way actually made realize how the number of bugs there is actually low for what a clusterfuck it is.
CVE 9.8/10.0 and all that.
I look forward to when code can express the richness of natural languages. In the meantime, formally-declared law is a fantasy. (Exhibit A: any court opinion.)
> You might have to start off an extremely simplistic set of rules (kinda like RocoCop's prime directives or Moses' 10 commandments)
Every civilisation has a leader who thought they could reïnvent law from first principles. Nobody uses their systems. (Legal axioms ultimately track to time immemorial, i.e.g prehistory.)
> Killing is wrong unless X is true
Murder vs manslaugher vs self defence vs execution vs being stabbed by a soldier is a good lens into law. (Or, to be provocative, eating meat.)
> it would be an interesting exercise
It's a popular in laws school. In its failure one learns of the intersection between culture and the law and why VHS beat Betamax.
Very good! I think these are all interpretations of the same type of event. Do you know the Russell conjugation?
Sure. But legally--and culturally--very different. If someone doesn't see that, they probably shouldn't be commenting on the law. (Practically speaking, they probably aren't.)
Social constructs are socially constructed. Given social systems are heterogenous, this variation is far from profound. (It’s almost corollary.)
> no different to Scrabble or poker
In the way Duplos and dielectric physics are the same.
> if an individual is able to direct the creation of rules in their favour, why shouldn't they?
One usually can’t.
Not really. I imagine its fine to shoot a burglar in the US who breaks in your house, but you could go to jail for murder in the UK. Soldiers can kill civilians without consequences. So can governments (death row, in the US).
>> if an individual is able to direct the creation of rules in their favour, why shouldn't they?
> One usually can’t.
I think most(/all?) law is created this way. Eg a pretty small collection of individuals that have the sway in a corporation use the corporation to pay lobbyists to draft laws to benefit them (creating a moat, force individuals to pay (health insurance), etc, etc). This is done in the name of serving the public interest. The political class then rubber stamps these proposals, in order to receive a seat on the board on retiring from politics.
I think your point may be that laws currently do have nuance (eg murder vs manslaughter vs...) which is all fine. By all means load those rules into the system too, but the point of the language and compiler is that while you're doing this you pay attention to compiler errors along the way and at least be aware when a change (to a rule, or the meaning of a term or type) caused some other change that you didn't expect. Eg: changing the meaning of a word here makes one law ambiguous and causes these two to clash.
Using it in law school is a great idea. It's where it should begin.