151–160 of 312 posts
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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.
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).
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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 wh…
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 s…
If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
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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 wh…
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.
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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
"Person" in legalese means something specific. It's not the same as the dictionary definition.
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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.
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.…
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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 wh…
> 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?
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,…
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.
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 differ…
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 wh…
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,…
> 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.
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,…
I guess the legal system discovered the "worse is better" philosophy before we did.