The concept of legal personhood is problematic on its own.
The law cannot take a concept and add "legal" to it, to expand its definition. it should simply define a new term that has no relationship with the former.
Instead of updating laws to adapt to entities that require legislation, they instead chose to expand the meaning of what a person is, so that the protections of a person also applies to that entity, but not always. What a twisted and crooked thing the law is sometimes.
A law that contradicts reality or logic is invalid. But we don't follow laws because of their validity, so that is irrelevant. Except for the problem of the legal system's legitimacy, and the public's trust in it.
If a corporation, a ship or some other entity requires legal protections or if legal responsibilities should be placed on it, specific law should be passed to that effect.
I don't need to go on about the cancerous effect corporate personhood has had in the US in recent years to make a point, but the root cause is legislative laziness. If there are 100000 laws that involve a person, lawmakers are obliged to review every single one of them, determine which ones apply to a company and update those laws, or pass new ones as applicable.
For example, there is no reason for corporations being allowed to participate in politics (US), because they don't get to vote and the government derives its powers explicitly from individuals. But the crooked and twisted nature of the law is such that the lazy expansionism of the term "person" created this gray area where corporations can benefit from personhood but avoid its obligations since they're only a "legal" person. It leaves lots of room for interpretation, reverting governance to the whims of individual rulers (judges) instead of the rule of law. And that way, the law commits suicide.
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.
> 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.
Another pertinent example: (in the US) corporate officers are personally liable unpaid wages and can serve time for willfully neglecting to pay their workers.
> 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.
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?
Not correct: A share is a contract issued by the corporation entitling its owner to a share of future profits. So you're not buying a corporation, just engaging in a contract with it.
I hate Citizens United as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good argument against it.
> 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.
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.
And yet the owners for the benefit of whom those high ranking employees have committed their crimes run free, keeping the spoils. Not even "spoils except for some monetary punishment" is they sold at the right time. Imprisoning CEOs solves depressingly little.
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.
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.
Without corporate personhood, you can't even really do business with a business, only with individuals. So if you want your warranty upheld, I guess you have to find Steve who sold you the fridge, because it's certainly not GE's or Home Depot's problem.
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.
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.
> or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
I suspect we can, and I know we should make corporations not have ALL of the same rights as a citizen. The first thing that comes to mind is barring them from political donations. It would also be great if their “free speech” didn’t extend to being able to censor legal content they don’t like or to payment and Internet infrastructure providers being able to cut off service to sites with legal content they don’t like(porn, certain politics, hateful content, etc.).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I want personhood for rivers because the rivers near me are being irreparably abused, and anything that can give them greater legal protection is welcome,
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
It does make sense, but from a tech perspective, this smells like a bad hack. "Ooo, writing all new rules with this in mind is a crazy amount of work, but if we just say that a ship implements the Person interface, look, the laws mostly work out!"
Not a bad analogy as a river is fed by its watershed (shareholders, inhabitants, landowners, state reserves, etc.) and delivers water downstream (customers, clients, dependents, etc.) as well as having its own inherent structure and function, water quality, biodiversity support (eg providing steady employ to 100K people in a local region, the daily structural business of capital and material flows, etc.).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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
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".
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Global companies tend to use Common Law for international business. I've been operating in one of them and often reviewing contracts. When forming international agreements, businesses frequently opt for a common law system due to its perceived adaptability and flexibility in dealing with evolving commercial environments.
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.
If we think about applicability to AI (as the footnote suggests was on the authors mind)… I found myself thinking about the motivations and incentives that existed at the time, to understand why.
Ships - my read is that major naval powers essentially reduced the downside to owners of ships (making them responsible) while giving the owners salvage rights (“curing” the problem of a wreck which may be an impediment to the passage). That seems to make sense if you put your “I’m a shipowner” hat on. Balanced by the governments also saying if your ship sunk and someone else recovers it, they get some cut bc hey, you didn’t recover it.
And the others seem largely about modern governments appeasing religious and indigenous groups. And it’s interesting that this acknowledgement seems to be part of a broader solution (Trust, ongoing governance etc)
The first seems more financially motivated (capping downside and clearing shipwrecks). The latter seems more about protecting a natural resource/asset.
So then you think about who is leading AI and what their incentives may be… Convenient that we do have modern companies that limit liability, do you just use that structure (as they are) or do they seek to go further and say this Agent or LLM is its own thing, as as a company I’m not responsible for it.
maybe that is convenient for the companies, and the gov in the countries leading the charge…? Looks more like ships than rivers..?
I think AI personhood will come about via another path. That is the same as Animal rights.
We humans in general, suffer, when we perceive animals suffering. Its an entirely emotional response. Humans are developing emotional attachments to LLMs. It follows, to an extent, that people will try and shore up the rights of LLMs simply to assuage their emotions. It doesnt actually matter whether or not it can feel pain, but whether it can express pain in a way that causes a sympathetic emotion in a person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the novel The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, after the Pope remarks that the aliens involved are "other children of God", I had the thought that perhaps when humans create AI robots, the Pope might consider these robots to be grandchildren of God.
I'm not trying to drag religion into this, despite my obviously doing so on the surface.
I am trying to see where certain flexibilities might be found, since there seems to be some flexibility on personhood in law.
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.
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).
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...?
Polders have personhood in some jurisdictions.
The government reclaimed the land from the sea,
sold it to multiple people, levies taxes on them and now the dykes need to be maintained.
This is just legal fiction, technology developed and applied cross industry.
The mere concept of water rights implies obligations must lie someplace.
All this talk about reified gods takes away much of how mundane the concept is.
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.
The second case was apalling. No human would inflict such a cruel punishment like a blind bureaucracy can. A similar case is an iranian who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years. Completely pointless.
My comment was clearly a joke; however yes, in the jurisdiction I am living in, you would be assisting in euthanasia, which would render you liable for murder.
>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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The concept of legal personhood is problematic on its own.
The law cannot take a concept and add "legal" to it, to expand its definition. it should simply define a new term that has no relationship with the former.
Instead of updating laws to adapt to entities that require legislation, they instead chose to expand the meaning of what a person is, so that the protections of a person also applies to that entity, but not always. What a twisted and crooked thing the law is sometimes.
A law that contradicts reality or logic is invalid. But we don't follow laws because of their validity, so that is irrelevant. Except for the problem of the legal system's legitimacy, and the public's trust in it.
If a corporation, a ship or some other entity requires legal protections or if legal responsibilities should be placed on it, specific law should be passed to that effect.
I don't need to go on about the cancerous effect corporate personhood has had in the US in recent years to make a point, but the root cause is legislative laziness. If there are 100000 laws that involve a person, lawmakers are obliged to review every single one of them, determine which ones apply to a company and update those laws, or pass new ones as applicable.
For example, there is no reason for corporations being allowed to participate in politics (US), because they don't get to vote and the government derives its powers explicitly from individuals. But the crooked and twisted nature of the law is such that the lazy expansionism of the term "person" created this gray area where corporations can benefit from personhood but avoid its obligations since they're only a "legal" person. It leaves lots of room for interpretation, reverting governance to the whims of individual rulers (judges) instead of the rule of law. And that way, the law commits suicide.
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.
> 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.
Another pertinent example: (in the US) corporate officers are personally liable unpaid wages and can serve time for willfully neglecting to pay their workers.
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> 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.
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?
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Well, then share buybacks are just the corporation reclaiming its freedom. Everything makes sense now...
And if corporations aren’t people, then the New York Times has no right to the First Amendment.
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Not correct: A share is a contract issued by the corporation entitling its owner to a share of future profits. So you're not buying a corporation, just engaging in a contract with it.
I hate Citizens United as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good argument against it.
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> 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.
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.
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And yet the owners for the benefit of whom those high ranking employees have committed their crimes run free, keeping the spoils. Not even "spoils except for some monetary punishment" is they sold at the right time. Imprisoning CEOs solves depressingly little.
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.
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.
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Without corporate personhood, you can't even really do business with a business, only with individuals. So if you want your warranty upheld, I guess you have to find Steve who sold you the fridge, because it's certainly not GE's or Home Depot's problem.
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
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.
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> or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
I suspect we can, and I know we should make corporations not have ALL of the same rights as a citizen. The first thing that comes to mind is barring them from political donations. It would also be great if their “free speech” didn’t extend to being able to censor legal content they don’t like or to payment and Internet infrastructure providers being able to cut off service to sites with legal content they don’t like(porn, certain politics, hateful content, etc.).
> 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.
Could the shareholders have caused or prevented the action? If not then I think it'll be a dofficult prosecution.
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.
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.
Yup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...
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.
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.
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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.
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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)
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.
>My sister is a ship
Found one.
> Rhodian sea law, from 900 BCE, states that if a salvor rescues property from the perilous seas, they are entitled to a share of the saved property.
Unlikely, given that the Greek alphabet didn’t exist in 900 BCE.
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.
> 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.
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
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I want personhood for rivers because the rivers near me are being irreparably abused, and anything that can give them greater legal protection is welcome,
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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.
> 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.
Arthur Anderson, The accounting firm, got the death penalty in the Enron debacle.
This 1000x
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?
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.
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> 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.
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.
no river ever hit me with a strategic lawsuit
Part of having personhood is that one’s ideas don’t have to have any logical or consistent basis.
It does make sense, but from a tech perspective, this smells like a bad hack. "Ooo, writing all new rules with this in mind is a crazy amount of work, but if we just say that a ship implements the Person interface, look, the laws mostly work out!"
> 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.
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.
Not a bad analogy as a river is fed by its watershed (shareholders, inhabitants, landowners, state reserves, etc.) and delivers water downstream (customers, clients, dependents, etc.) as well as having its own inherent structure and function, water quality, biodiversity support (eg providing steady employ to 100K people in a local region, the daily structural business of capital and material flows, etc.).
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?
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.
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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).
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> 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.
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?
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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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
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> 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).
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
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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".
United States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque
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.
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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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?)
> If corporations are people,
Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is distinct.
Composition, not inheritance.
> 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?
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The first example was corporations which also aren’t people because that isn’t what corporate personhood means.
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)
That’s not a real old case, it’s an urban legend. You don’t remember the case, you remember reading some fiction.
In most of the world, "a shipment of dildos" cannot be a participant of a trial, this is a US curiosity.
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Damn dildos get more representation than me.
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.
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.
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/accelerando.h...)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
Looks interesting, thank you!
>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?
Global companies tend to use Common Law for international business. I've been operating in one of them and often reviewing contracts. When forming international agreements, businesses frequently opt for a common law system due to its perceived adaptability and flexibility in dealing with evolving commercial environments.
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.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
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
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-...
I enjoyed reading this.
If we think about applicability to AI (as the footnote suggests was on the authors mind)… I found myself thinking about the motivations and incentives that existed at the time, to understand why.
Ships - my read is that major naval powers essentially reduced the downside to owners of ships (making them responsible) while giving the owners salvage rights (“curing” the problem of a wreck which may be an impediment to the passage). That seems to make sense if you put your “I’m a shipowner” hat on. Balanced by the governments also saying if your ship sunk and someone else recovers it, they get some cut bc hey, you didn’t recover it.
And the others seem largely about modern governments appeasing religious and indigenous groups. And it’s interesting that this acknowledgement seems to be part of a broader solution (Trust, ongoing governance etc)
The first seems more financially motivated (capping downside and clearing shipwrecks). The latter seems more about protecting a natural resource/asset.
So then you think about who is leading AI and what their incentives may be… Convenient that we do have modern companies that limit liability, do you just use that structure (as they are) or do they seek to go further and say this Agent or LLM is its own thing, as as a company I’m not responsible for it.
maybe that is convenient for the companies, and the gov in the countries leading the charge…? Looks more like ships than rivers..?
I think AI personhood will come about via another path. That is the same as Animal rights.
We humans in general, suffer, when we perceive animals suffering. Its an entirely emotional response. Humans are developing emotional attachments to LLMs. It follows, to an extent, that people will try and shore up the rights of LLMs simply to assuage their emotions. It doesnt actually matter whether or not it can feel pain, but whether it can express pain in a way that causes a sympathetic emotion in a person.
This made me think of The Tree that Owns Itself in Athens, GA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
If the Te Awa Tupua is a legal person, and it floods its banks and destroys my home, can I sue it and be made whole?
It seems like they've afforded a river all the rights and privileges of a person with none of the responsibilities, duties, or obligations.
That’s the magic of parliamentary sovereignty right there
They included liabilities. they even recommending the river to register as charitable entity for tax purposes.
You should change the title to "Unexpected things that are legal entities", to make it less click-baity.
I think it’s fine because it plays off the commonly stated “corporations are people” sentence that exists in the world.
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.
I usually use that as a bozo filter
Yes, I was expecting this to be about AI sensory failures.
Let's not forget that incorporated cities, towns etc are people too
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh yes all kinds of ethical issues as well.
That sounds like a sure-fire recipe for adverse selection.
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.
New Zealand also has an official Wizard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_New_Zealand
In the novel The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, after the Pope remarks that the aliens involved are "other children of God", I had the thought that perhaps when humans create AI robots, the Pope might consider these robots to be grandchildren of God.
I'm not trying to drag religion into this, despite my obviously doing so on the surface.
I am trying to see where certain flexibilities might be found, since there seems to be some flexibility on personhood in law.
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.
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.
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).
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...?
Polders have personhood in some jurisdictions. The government reclaimed the land from the sea, sold it to multiple people, levies taxes on them and now the dykes need to be maintained.
This is just legal fiction, technology developed and applied cross industry.
The mere concept of water rights implies obligations must lie someplace. All this talk about reified gods takes away much of how mundane the concept is.
It’s fascinating how corporate personhood started as a legal convenience but ended up shaping how power and responsibility work in modern society.
> 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?
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.
> the crews were required
Required by whom? Local legal bodies or maritime agreements?
The second case was apalling. No human would inflict such a cruel punishment like a blind bureaucracy can. A similar case is an iranian who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years. Completely pointless.
If someone drowns in Te Awa Tupua, does the river get charged with Murder, or Manslaughter?
If you strangle yourself with my arm, did I murder you?
My comment was clearly a joke; however yes, in the jurisdiction I am living in, you would be assisting in euthanasia, which would render you liable for murder.
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> Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abroad,
But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
Call me what you will.
>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!
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.
i wonder how a river would be held liable for propery damage, or wrongful death
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.
> 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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
This article is apparently a spinoff of an AI personhood project.[1]
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26396
The tree that owns itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
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
There’s also the tree that got arrested - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/03...
Ethel?
I'm smiling already. Excellent read. This writer has SKILLS!
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.
Wow, the OO inheritance model really was a mistake.
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
Correct.
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.
> Are people actually this daft.
Some are, for others its just another mechanism they can use to push for socialism.
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).
Great article but disappointed that the monkey with the camera did not make an appearance.
>> 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.
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.
> "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.
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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.
> 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.
> 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.