Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#2This is silly. He's challenging the state's vehicle code not "corporate personhood". If this is some retaliation for Citizens United he'll be surprised to hear that the ruling didn't establish corporate personhood at all.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#3He's going to lose because having the incorporation papers in the car does not mean he has the corporation in the car. I would argue that a corporation's physical location is its registered agent address.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#4He's going to lose because having the incorporation papers in the car does not mean he has the corporation in the car. I would argue that a corporation's physical location is its registered agent address.
definitely agree, gonna be tough to argue that the corporation itself was "present" in his car
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#5I though corporate personhood was just about the ability for a corporation to be party to a contract.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#6Is there another source that clarifies the claim that CA law explicitly includes corporations in the car pool lane laws? As it is, this is such an obvious publicity stunt that I am not inclined to trust the lawyers for Frieman.
Some lady in Seattle goes around "marrying" corporations. Unsurprisingly, they aren't legal marriages.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#7He's going to lose because having the incorporation papers in the car does not mean he has the corporation in the car. I would argue that a corporation's physical location is its registered agent address.
I would go further and argue that a corporation is an abstract legal entity, and thus has no physical location. A corporation's buildings or employees may be located somewhere, but that doesn't mean that "the corporation is there".
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#8He's going to lose because having the incorporation papers in the car does not mean he has the corporation in the car. I would argue that a corporation's physical location is its registered agent address.
I agree with your location assessment, and if a lower-level judge pushes this hard enough, I don't see an appeal as a viable avenue.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#9I though corporate personhood was just about the ability for a corporation to be party to a contract.
That's part of it, but not even the most important part. The other half is this:
Can the US government announce that the New York Times may no longer run stories critical of administration policy? Can they confiscate Apple's cash reserves to help pay off the national debt? Can they, without permission or a warrant, march into Google's data centers and read through all the email stored in Gmail?
The answer to these questions is, respectively, no, no, and no. But why? The reason is not that the NYT, Apple, and Google are people with rights to free speech, property, and privacy; rather it is because the shareholders of these firms are real people with such rights, they do not lose these rights merely because they have organised their affairs to take the corporate form, and it would negatively impact their rights if the courts did not extend protection to the corporations they own.
In other words, corporate personhood is a legal fiction which is deployed when (and only when) not doing so would impair the rights of real people. This explains why the NYT gets free speech rights (it would negatively impact the free speech rights of Sulzberger family who own the NYT to take them away), but doesn't get to vote (since not letting a company vote does not impact the rights of real people to vote).
TL;DR: The main reason for corporate personhood is so that the government can't violate peoples free speech, property rights, privacy right, etc just because they have organised their affairs as a corporation.
Re: Frieman contests carpool violation, corporate personhood...
#10This is silly. He's challenging the state's vehicle code not "corporate personhood". If this is some retaliation for Citizens United he'll be surprised to hear that the ruling didn't establish corporate personhood at all.
Yeah, there's so much wrong with that article...
Not only is he challenging the state vehicle code (which means, win or lose, even on appeal, it will lead at MOST to a revision of the California vehicle code), but as you say Citizens United does not establish corporate personhood.
At most they've found some poor drafting in a state statute, but even so the most likely outcome is they'll be laughed at. The obvious route is for a court to say "sure, a company counts as a person for this statute but you didn't have a company, you had the incorporation papers, which is different".
What a poltroon.