corporations as people

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Fri Apr 20 08:14:42 PDT 2001


What's the point? To get the
>Supreme Court to realize it made a terrible mistake 107 years ago?
>
>Doug

It's not going to happen, but it would be nice to strip corporations of their legal rights to due process, equal protection, free speech, and other things that real people have, and to return them to the status of partnerships or unincorporated associations with respect to that sort of thing. It would reduce their legal leverage. Of course with the rollback of classic substantive due process jurisprudence in the New Deal, the point of rolling back corporate personhood is lessened.

I agree with you that there is no good reason to abolish the corporate forma s such, although the basic need for it under capitalism is (a) to limit the liaibility of potential investors, and (b) to raise lots of capital in small amounts. In a society where productive assets were publically owned for the most part and where new investment was planned, the need for the corporate form would be less compelling. It's not immediately obvious why worker self-managed coops in market or planned socialism would use it. Maybe to limit tort liability. I presume that there would be tort law under socialism, if only to deter negligence.

Oops, sorry, there I go talking about alternatives again, silly utopian me.

--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com



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