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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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They made a film about that | 111 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
They made a film about that
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 04 2012 @ 11:44 PM EDT
But corporations are NOT 'legally a person'. They do not have all of the rights
of an individual nor the capabilities. A corporation cannot vote, drink alcohol
or get a passport, even if it claims to be a citizen over the age of 21. What
the law does do, generally, is treat a corporation as an entity which has the
same sorts of rights which an individual has, taking notice that some of those
rights cannot apply to a corporation since it does not have the capability. We
may rhetorically call a corporation an abortion, but it can never have one. Nor
have a baby.

Person can also mean 'an individual'.

So it depends upon which meaning of 'person' you want to use. Just because laws
often have a definition that 'person includes a corporation' does NOT make a
corporation into a person. It only means that, in that instance, a corporation
can be charged as an entity for doing things which its employees have actually
done.
Just because one maps onto the other does not make the mapping transitive.
'Juridical persons' exist because the 'package' which results is a convenient
way of bundling things together to handle problems. Trusts, corporations and
partnerships are "treated as if they are people" because it is
convenient for us to apply the same rules to those entities as would be applied
to a single person. But just because that mental mapping is convenient does not
make it dispositive. That would mean that corporations could be arrested and
thrown in jail. How would you do that? Grab the corporate seal?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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