Constitutional amendment

[Drekkan85]

No they are not. It is just quite simply a fact. I would make an argument for it, but it is quite clear to anyone who considers what a person is even for a second. So do you have any argument for corporations being people?

Because they have to be - see below.

Yes, create the rights (and only the necessary rights) for a business to work. To call them people would be laughable if it wasn't sad and potentially dangerous in the future. Almost on par with saying women and children are objects. Such disregard for what a person is and why it is important.

Corporations have to be people because it's the legal fiction that is required for business. In order to create a similar situation other than using the definition of person would require extensive legislative work. And that's just to establish the corporation initially. Following that you have problems in terms of catchign corporations satisfactorily in existing legislation - amending each and every piece of corporate, commercial, contractual, property, and criminal law. Even then, you have serious problems in terms of potential loopholes and holes in the law that won't be noticed until problems arise, and then you either need an ex post facto law, or allow corporations to slip through legal cracks until they're plastered over.

There are no disadvantages to considering corporations people - and there can be serious advantages. Corporations can bring to bear greater resources in the judicial system to help other non-corporate entities and persons. Take Big M Drug Mart (a key Constitutional case in Canada) - where a corporation (gasp, the evil evil corporation) fought (successfully) to apply freedom of religion to allow them to keep their store open on a Sunday. Because meaning is sticky, that change applies across the board, allowing numerous mom and pop stores to open on Sunday as well. The advantage here is that non-corporate entities would have had serious problems getting the legal expertise and paying the bills through a Supreme Court judgment.

So again, I point to the fact that you're putting an immense legislative burden on the legislature, creating great contractual and legal uncertainty, and doing it all for no appreciable gain.

 

[Paradoxum]

Because they have to be - see below.

So you seem to agree they aren't.

Corporations have to be people because it's the legal fiction that is required for business. In order to create a similar situation other than using the definition of person would require extensive legislative work. And that's just to establish the corporation initially. Following that you have problems in terms of catchign corporations satisfactorily in existing legislation - amending each and every piece of corporate, commercial, contractual, property, and criminal law. Even then, you have serious problems in terms of potential loopholes and holes in the law that won't be noticed until problems arise, and then you either need an ex post facto law, or allow corporations to slip through legal cracks until they're plastered over.

There are no disadvantages to considering corporations people - and there can be serious advantages. Corporations can bring to bear greater resources in the judicial system to help other non-corporate entities and persons. Take Big M Drug Mart (a key Constitutional case in Canada) - where a corporation (gasp, the evil evil corporation) fought (successfully) to apply freedom of religion to allow them to keep their store open on a Sunday. Because meaning is sticky, that change applies across the board, allowing numerous mom and pop stores to open on Sunday as well. The advantage here is that non-corporate entities would have had serious problems getting the legal expertise and paying the bills through a Supreme Court judgment.

So again, I point to the fact that you're putting an immense legislative burden on the legislature, creating great contractual and legal uncertainty, and doing it all for no appreciable gain.

As crazy as it might sound, I'm not against corporations. Just against them being immoral and totally self-interested. So as good (or having its self-interest coincide with goodness) as 'Big M Drug Mart' might be, on the other hand you have an oil company lying about global warming or paying politicians to do what they want. The majority of my post was about this.

Perhaps you are right, but I think you should make it clear that 'corporations are people' is a blatant (yet helpful) lie. Just to make clear the civilisation hasn't gone insane.

 

[cow451]

I cannot think of any amendment that would ever get enacted because there is too much special interest money to battle any potential amendment from any perspective.

My fantasy would be to ban all political advertising and campaigning earlier than three weeks before an election. But that would violate the First Amendment. Shucks.

 

[Drekkan85]

So you seem to agree they aren't.

They are - legally. No one, at least no one with a brain cell, thinks a corporation is literally a person. Rather, they believe that a corporation is, and should be, a person within the legal framework we've established. We regularly establish lay words as having meaning that are wholly or partially divorced from their "lay" meanings. It's why many laws contain a "definitions" section (and many laws contain several).

As crazy as it might sound, I'm not against corporations. Just against them being immoral and totally self-interested. So as good (or having its self-interest coincide with goodness) as 'Big M Drug Mart' might be, on the other hand you have an oil company lying about global warming or paying politicians to do what they want. The majority of my post was about this.

Perhaps you are right, but I think you should make it clear that 'corporations are people' is a blatant (yet helpful) lie. Just to make clear the civilisation hasn't gone insane.

It doesn't sound crazy at all. Corporations are the basis of modern economics, and have led to fantastic developments across society. Again, just because corporation do bad things doesn't make them inherently bad, or not persons within a legal sense. Heck, I would have thought that you'd be supportive of corporate personhood because then corporations can be held accountable via the legal system including, but not limited to, the criminal law powers of government.

And yet again, I don't think anyone thinks "Look at the hot mamma jamma of a corporation, I'd like to marry it!" No one actually thinks that a corporation is a living breathing person. However, having a corporation defined as a person within the legal system gives us the desired outcome without negative side effects (that your system would have) for only the most symbolic of points (since you'd enact legislation to recreate the corporation in all points anyway).

The corporations =/= persons amendment is either pointless, or it's a massive negative on the economy. It's passed on by people that have never studied law, have no conception of how corporate law works, or the potential ramifications of their actions.