What authority serves to provide transnational corporations their identity? I used to think that Delaware was a 'flag nation' for corps.
I guess my question originated when I was wondering what would happen to a corp if their articles of incorporation were vacated by the issuing authority. That would at least remove the fiction of their constitutional rights.
It's a debate in the literature since at least the late 1890s, when the first real systematic analysis of "identity" was undertaken in US. That debate itself fed a lot off the continental work of the day. It was 'abandoned' as a debate after Dewey's interventions in the day -- although historians of corporate theory argue that it was more "passed over" than abandoned (Horowitz) as a structural/institutional analysis of corproations (Berle & Means) became more fashionable.
The debate, when it raged (and Teubner made a contribution again in the early 1990s lamenting the lack of theorizing of the corporate actor in modern social systems) was probably defined by three schools of thought, those who argue that corproations pre-existed the state grant of rights codified in the mid-1800s, and have a view that corporations are large partnerships and collectives of natural persons ruled by agency or partnership norms, and as such, had no independent legal perosnality, but were "cascades of contracts" in the modern parlance (this contractualist theory was domainant in the mainstream US academy from 1970 to 2000, arguably still is); the grant theory, that corporations existed solely by act of the state (this was historically supported by grants of monopoly and "letters patent" corporations) and the "natural person" theory, which ended up "winning" the debate or at least being adopted by courts and policy-makers in the early 1900s, which posited a separate "identity" (called separate legal personality) which had the lucky attribute of limited liability (unlike natural persons) but which required no state enabling role (luckily for incorporators!) and therefore had constitutional rights but was not bound by constitutiuonal limits on government action. This formula was of course most suited to expanding use of corporations in economic life, on corporatons' terms. I'm probably hashing up some of the terms here (its been a while since I did this reading) but those are the basic positions in the early debate. I'm not sure theory has advanced it much since then.
The intervention you propose is a "grant theory" intervention, that suggests that corporations' identity - or at least legal identity - is purely a function of state discretion, which itself must set up a public policy for granting the legal right to exist and then revoking it. That theory is widely regarded as unworkable or even dead my mainstream legal theorists, although the really good critical legal tgheorists (say, Paddy Ireland) use it as part of the analysis of the way in which legal rules not only enable but constitute a significant part of capital markets (securities law) and their actors (corporations, securities, holders, etc.). I am probably mashing his argument to pieces but that is the basic line, I think, derived from an application of the 'fictional capital' analysis of intangible property. It has some VERY interesting parallels with IP that has been discussed here.
POCLAD takes this cause up with some gusto, the movement to have state or federal regulators revoke corporate registration under certain conditions.
By the by, the movie The Corporation based on the book by Balkan (an admin law/constitutional law expert, not a corporate theory guru) committed the very sin it sought to chastise, by spendng the entire time treating corporations as if they were "people" with DSM-IV symptoms. Although the take-home message may have been "this is not the way to think of corporations" most folks, I think, only get as far as "corproations are evil/psycho" which they may be in some collective way, but which misses the fun of looking at them as collectivities and the problem of what an identity of a collectivity is, in the legal sense, at least.
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