[HN Gopher] Unexpected things that are people
___________________________________________________________________
Unexpected things that are people
Author : lindowe
Score : 380 points
Date : 2025-11-10 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bengoldhaber.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bengoldhaber.substack.com)
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| 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).
| metada5e wrote:
| 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.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Looks interesting, thank you!
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 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.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| In the US, a corporation needs a business bank account, and
| that account must be registered to one or more corporate
| officers with legal identification.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Does it count if the officer is in cryosleep?
| rzzzt wrote:
| A bench warrant is indefinite so they will be brought to
| court immediately after core temperature and circulation
| is restored. It will be posted to the cylinder like a
| parking ticket.
|
| IANAL, not in any of the parallel universes either!
| bongodongobob wrote:
| You absolutely do not need a bank account for an LLC. It
| makes accounting easier, but it's not a requirement.
| toss1 wrote:
| Can confirm, having started multiple LLCs and S-Corps.
|
| You get the corporate entity first, and this is
| _required_ to get the bank account.
|
| So, if the bank account was required to get the corporate
| entity formed, none would ever be formed, as the bank
| acct and the corporate authorization would forever be
| waiting for the other prerequisite to be complete.
|
| And no, AFAICT, there is no hard requirement for a bank
| account to maintain a corporation, although in practice
| it would make doing almost everything quite inconvenient.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In Czechia, you need a specific sort of account to start
| a LLC, an account that is only used to contain the
| initial capital.
|
| The bank will issue a confirmation to the notary that the
| money is present in that account, the notary will sign
| the founding papers, and the account is then liquidated
| again. You can take the money out, or move it to
| [different] regular account, or have none and operate in
| cash, as long as your transactions don't exceed a certain
| limit.
|
| The exception is when you become a VAT payer. In that
| moment, you have to have at least one bank account. IIRC
| VAT registration is only required if your yearly revenue
| exceeds approx. 70 thousand dollars.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 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.
| nocoiner wrote:
| That's basically just the benefits of limited liability,
| that has nothing to do with AI personhood. And you're
| basically just describing the formation of a legal
| entity, the reference to AGI could just as easily be
| replaced with "talented founder" or "dual class shares"
| or "poison pill" or something.
|
| In any event, the law tends to be responsive about
| establishing doctrines for extending liability to
| individuals involved, like piercing the corporate veil,
| principles of partnership, or a statutory regime (like
| CERCLA).
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| OTOH if a fairy tale about AI is what it takes to get
| lawmakers to abandon (or at least reform) the corporate
| form, then let's tell the fairy tale.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Sure, it's just a legal entity. One that just so happens
| to give a clever machine a foothold in the human legal
| system.
|
| Frankly, I just find the idea amusing.
| nocoiner wrote:
| 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.
| etothepii wrote:
| A sufficiently long circle of corporations would be
| difficult to follow. Corporations can in some jurisdictions
| be secretary or indeed directors.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| 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/accelera
| ndo.h...)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >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?
| coliveira wrote:
| > Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally
|
| That's not even close to be true, except for former and present
| English colonies. Most of the world follows civil law that
| itself follows Roman law.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think there is a difference between having some sort of legal
| entity to classify organized groups as - and that legal entity
| being equivalent of a person.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| degamad wrote:
| 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.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| 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.
| jojomodding wrote:
| 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.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| There is already a standard of evidence for this: "Knew
| or should have known". Which covers needing to exercise a
| certain standard of care, but without the overly rigid
| definition of strict liability (something that tends to
| result in very stupid and unfair situations).
| thewebguyd wrote:
| What we have is a severe lack of enforcement of the laws
| we do have.
|
| We do have legal mechanisms to hold the individual people
| criminally liable for criminal offenses the corporation
| commits, the problem is we don't enforce it.
|
| Boeing just got off scott free for killing 338 people.
| DOJ told the judge to dismiss the case.
|
| We've also neglected to enforce our own anti-monopoly
| laws for far too long, and most recently when there could
| have been actual, real change, we let Google go with
| nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
|
| The laws aren't the problem, the corrupt and paid for DoJ
| is the problem.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean we live in a country where 'defund the police' and
| 'eliminate jails' are considered somewhat mainstream
| legal positions (In that there are many politicians
| elected to office throughout the country who have held
| these views). All of its stems from a lack of desire to
| enforce standards.
| chowells wrote:
| Given that neither the police nor jails are relevant to
| corporate violations of the law, do you have a point
| other than that you don't understand either of those?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| > 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...
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Yup
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...
| otterdude wrote:
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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.
| ar_lan wrote:
| > 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.
| nzeid wrote:
| > 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| Well, then share buybacks are just the corporation reclaiming
| its freedom. Everything makes sense now...
| monocularvision wrote:
| And if corporations aren't people, then the New York Times
| has no right to the First Amendment.
| jmye wrote:
| I'm curious what you think "Congress shall make no law
| [...] abridging the freedom of [...] the press" means, in
| this case. Did you just not know what the actual text is,
| or ... ?
| bjt wrote:
| A restriction on government (as the First Amendment
| language is phrased) is not the same thing as an
| individual right. There are plenty of cases where a
| restriction is in the law, but only a very limited set of
| entities has standing to sue to enforce it. You could
| imagine such a case with regard to the First Amendment if
| we didn't have the corporate personhood doctrine.
| jmye wrote:
| I have no idea what that has to do with my comment or the
| one I responded to. The freedom of the press is
| guaranteed by the first amendment. The NYT doesn't
| suddenly lose "rights to it" if it's not seen as a
| person.
|
| "Corporate personhood" is irrelevant, in this comment
| chain, and is just a way to take a swipe at an ostensibly
| left-leaning org in order to turn this into a team sport.
| nzeid wrote:
| But their employees collectively do. I know this is not the
| approach the US court system decided to humor, but there's
| no way around journalists' rights.
| shawndrost wrote:
| 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?
| foolswisdom wrote:
| 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.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| >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!
| leeoniya wrote:
| i wonder how a river would be held liable for propery damage,
| or wrongful death
| autoexec wrote:
| You can jail it by building a dam, or banish it from areas by
| redirecting the river around them, or insert a water wheel
| and sentence it to forced labor.
| JackFr wrote:
| It's less silly if one thinks of it as the New Zealand
| Parliament created a Whanganui River Authority and endowed it
| with the same structure and rights.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| 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.
| jstanley wrote:
| > 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.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Part of having personhood is that one's ideas don't have to
| have any logical or consistent basis.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| 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.
| tyre wrote:
| > Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood
| would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a
| river can/should be normalized.
|
| Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the
| former but not the latter.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| JackFr wrote:
| > 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.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > 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?
| altruios wrote:
| > 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).
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| 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
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| markerz wrote:
| 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.
| JackFr wrote:
| > Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood
|
| Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own
| property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or
| defendant in lawsuits.
| pnut wrote:
| And be completely unaccountable in criminal court, for the
| consequences of their actions.
|
| Don't forget that one. All the rights, none of the
| responsibility.
| joeypickles wrote:
| 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?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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).
| kerkeslager wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Corporations are neither agents nor beneficiaries. They
| don't take decisions. (That metaphorical abstraction _is_
| sometimes useful: here, it is not.) Some people _are_
| deciding to do things this way, and are benefiting from
| it, and those people are humans.
| glitchc wrote:
| Because it's much simpler to inherit laws than to craft a
| whole new set. Once an entity is declared a person, the
| rather complex web of existing legislation that applies to
| personhood automatically takes effect.
| joeypickles wrote:
| Simpler in the short run, but creates tech debt I think.
| bitwize wrote:
| > Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood
| would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a
| river can/should be normalized.
|
| Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are
| not the same thing.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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?
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| 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
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| This 1000x
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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?
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| AshleyGrant wrote:
| Because it means that someone with more money has a
| Constitutional right to be louder than those with less
| money.
| bjt wrote:
| > capital punishment should be on the table.
|
| Isn't it, though? If a corporation was found guilty of murder
| I wouldn't be surprised for a court to order it dissolved.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| OK yeah you convinced me.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Corporations are not legally humans and nobody who isn't
| either misinformed or purposely strawmanning considers a
| corporation to be a human. Legal personhood just means
| that a corporation can be a legal actor and possess
| certain rights and responsibilities. Perhaps they should
| have called it _persona ficta_ as they did 800 years ago,
| but the concept is useful and is not, like others in this
| thread have suggested, something that greedy corporations
| use to legally bludgeon the proletariat with.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > 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
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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
| wtetzner wrote:
| "Person" in legalese means something specific. It's not the
| same as the dictionary definition.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The proper reference isn't the dictionary. US
| socialization stems largely from the US Constitution.
| Within that framework, Person has a different meaning
| from the dictionary or most of the US legal frameworks.
| From that perspective, the objection to Person being
| ascribed to non-persons is obvious and warranted.
| otterdude wrote:
| I would like to see the law defining that!
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The tree that owns itself:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Ethel?
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Came here to post this, although sadly it isn't considered a
| person, and isn't actually the original tree. That said, I'd
| imagine if anyone tried to take down the son of the tree that
| owned itself, Athens residents would revolt. It's pretty famous
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There's also the tree that got arrested -
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/03...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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.
| strbean wrote:
| > Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended
| study abroad,
|
| But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
| wrboyce wrote:
| Call me what you will.
| tyre wrote:
| 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-...
| Animats wrote:
| This article is apparently a spinoff of an AI personhood
| project.[1]
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26396
| zkmon wrote:
| >> 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> "Person" is in this usage a piece of legal jargon._
|
| There is no usage of "Person" here. It says "People". The
| plural of "legal person" is "legal persons", so clearly
| nobody is talking about that.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The entire rest of the article is about legal personhood.
| 9rx wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| New Zealand also has an official Wizard:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_New_Zealand
| zkmon wrote:
| You should change the title to "Unexpected things that are _legal
| entities_ ", to make it less click-baity.
| jama211 wrote:
| I think it's fine because it plays off the commonly stated
| "corporations are people" sentence that exists in the world.
| umeshunni wrote:
| I usually use that as a bozo filter
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yes, I was expecting this to be about AI sensory failures.
| mallomarmeasle wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43286/43286-h/43286-h.htm
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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).
| tgv wrote:
| It's pretty tangential, but
|
| > It's not clear to me how a specific next friend is established
| - what if the god has a lot of friends?
|
| reminded me of Pratchett's Small Gods. If you needed a random
| book recommendation, this is it.
| scubbo wrote:
| GNU Terry Pratchett.
| beau_g wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > the crews were required
|
| Required by whom? Local legal bodies or maritime agreements?
| ori_b wrote:
| > Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers,
| duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
|
| Does that mean I can sue it for flooding my property?
| iamwil wrote:
| Sounds like a classic inheritance design problem.
|
| Anyway, I'd be surprised if AI didn't gain some kind of legal
| status with some kind of limited personhood, if corporations and
| ships can be.
| pugworthy wrote:
| 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.
| Vecr wrote:
| All you would get is even more insurance overhead and even
| higher nominal prices. People who pay cover people who don't,
| and doctors will get insurance to pay for all their failures.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Oh yes all kinds of ethical issues as well.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| That sounds like a sure-fire recipe for adverse selection.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| soared wrote:
| 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.
| otterley wrote:
| 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".
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In most of the world, "a shipment of dildos" cannot be a
| participant of a trial, this is a US curiosity.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I believe that in most parts of the world you will
| regularly find shipments of dildos participating in trials.
| westmeal wrote:
| Damn dildos get more representation than me.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That's not a real old case, it's an urban legend. You don't
| remember the case, you remember reading some fiction.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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.
| wmeredith wrote:
| 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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-9
| m...
| saintfire wrote:
| 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.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| > 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.
| elbasti wrote:
| Composition, not inheritance.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| cuttothechase wrote:
| 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?
| otterdude wrote:
| 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).
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The legal term you are looking for is Natural Person. Not
| every Person is a Natural Person.
| the_af wrote:
| > _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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| 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?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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...
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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?
| Supermancho wrote:
| 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.
| otterdude wrote:
| 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.
| niam wrote:
| "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.
| otterdude wrote:
| My arguments are as bad-faith as the arguments that lead to
| corporate personhood and citizens united. Fight fire with
| fire.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| 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?)
| themafia wrote:
| > If corporations are people,
|
| Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is
| distinct.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| The first example was corporations which also aren't people
| because that isn't what corporate personhood means.
| mkehrt wrote:
| United States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar
| Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch
| Wooden Plaque
| franze wrote:
| 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)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >My sister is a ship
|
| Found one.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > It's more like the New Zealand parliament reified a god and
| gave it a multi-million dollar trust fund to get on its feet.
|
| (joke)
|
| So if the Whanganui river floods well beyond its expected banks
| and ruins my property, can I sue it?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| 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.
| tclancy wrote:
| 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...
| toast0 wrote:
| The article quotes:
|
| > Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights,
| powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
|
| Which would seem to be yes. If the river damages your property,
| you should be able to seek redress through the courts.
| giobox wrote:
| 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.
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
| scubbo wrote:
| Correct.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| It is above civil law but it's not clear that's absolutely
| above criminal law. Most of this status is not actually
| codified in any document.
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| > Are people actually this daft.
|
| Some are, for others its just another mechanism they can use to
| push for socialism.
| languagehacker wrote:
| This made me think of The Tree that Owns Itself in Athens, GA:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| nzeid wrote:
| > 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.
| scubbo wrote:
| > 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.
| dcminter wrote:
| I rather enjoyed this, although I had assumed from the title that
| it was going to be "things" like the Internet Assigned Numbers
| Authority that at one time was Jon Postel (a person). Any other
| examples of that ilk...?
| golemotron wrote:
| Great article but disappointed that the monkey with the camera
| did not make an appearance.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| I'm smiling already. Excellent read. This writer has SKILLS!
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Wow, the OO inheritance model really _was_ a mistake.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-10 23:00 UTC)