Comment by NoboruWataya
3 months ago
> 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
"Person" in legalese means something specific. It's not the same as the dictionary definition.
The proper reference isn't the dictionary. US socialization stems largely from the US Constitution. Within that framework, Person has a different meaning from the dictionary or most of the US legal frameworks. From that perspective, the objection to Person being ascribed to non-persons is obvious and warranted.
I would like to see the law defining that!
2 replies →
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.