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They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means. People, of course, have rights.
by EnergyAmy 4mo ago
They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoYou have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together). Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people." However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time. Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
- EnergyAmy 4mo agoYou're confusing them again, which is why sneaking in priors with the term "people" is bad. "granted to them by the people" means "We The People", society, etc, not the people in control of the legal fiction. > being proxies of their constituents These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing. Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence. Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoThat's a lot of statements, so I'll dissect them. > People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules. > There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing. There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference. > Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist. > Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from. > We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights. Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
- EnergyAmy 4mo agoI'm also focused on the broader principle, not just specifically any one structure such as LLCs. I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so. Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights. What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights. I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.