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Comment by rickydroll | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that until I did a little digging into it. Specifically, corporations are considered legal persons because they are separate legal entities, thereby creating a wall between your personal affairs and your business. It protects your personal assets from any liabilities, debts, or lawsuits.

Also, since it's a separate entity, its lifetime is not tied to the owner. So if the owner dies, their shares are inherited by somebody else, and the company keeps operating.

It helps in raising money for business operations. A corporation raises capital by issuing and selling shares of stock. However, if a physical person did that, I think it would be called indentured servitude.

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I'm confused about why you believe this contrasts with what the above poster said. You've described a bunch of practical reasons why this is legally expedient and also at least one that seems to contrast with your own concept of personhood

Yes, it does conflict with my own concept of personhood. I forgot to add that to my comment.

I was trying to show that it is not "merely a legal expedient", that corporate personhood had a specific purpose, and that it differed from a real person. I think that the confusion about legal personhood in corporations comes from how lawyers explain its existence. A couple of lawyers I've had explained it as, it's just like a person in the law, except where it's different.

The problem is that we haven't created a clear enough distinction between a natural person and a legal person. In many cases, corporations have rights but not the responsibility. For example, they have speech rights, but they don't go to jail when the corporation commits a crime. The judicial inequalities between ordinary people and rich people are even greater between natural persons and corporations.

Yea, I mean, I think the reason people balk at corporate personhood are to do with both the iniquities committed by corporate actors and the fact that personhood is a really confusing model for all this

A model that treats what effectively amounts to a body of assets united by a charter as equivalent to a person - except when it isn't - is inherently confusing because these are not at all similar kinds of entities. While it's clear that this model has a purpose, I think people are right to point out that the equivalence is drawn by rather stilted logic and even more right to question whether the consequences of this legal framing are desirable from their perspective

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