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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

So when you need to make a contract with a corporation, who will you make it with? When you want to sue one, who will you sue? The individual officers? How are you going to prove they were responsible? If you sue the CEO because of something his subordinates did, and he dies 6 months later, what would happen to your legal action?

The legal fiction of corporate personhood exists for a good reason; it allows parties external to the corporation to transact business with and take action against the corporation without needing to know the individual structure of it. It's called a corporation because corpore is the Latin for body, giving it a distinct legal identity.

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> When you want to sue one, who will you sue?

Okay, since I'm sensing this is about to become a type theory conversation, let's start with the function definition:

sue :: Person -> Claim -> Person -> Maybe Money

Now you're basically saying that, given the above definition, we have no choice but to have Company implement the Person typeclass. Unfortunately, there is a lot of code already using the Person typeclass for purposes that are absurd when a Corporation is passed. Consider:

valid_for_carpool :: [Person] -> Boolean

So what to do? One option is to send out emails telling our colleagues to be very careful when using the Person typeclass. The other option is to create a new Suable typeclass, and implement it for both corporations and people.

Which one do you prefer?

have Company implement the Person typeclass

The obvious solution is to factor out a base class, LegalPerson, with some but not all of the behaviors of the existing Person class. Then derive a separate Company class from LegalPerson. All the stuff we don't want corporations to have, we leave in the existing Person class, so Company doesn't have it.

create a new Suable typeclass

I would view "Suable" as an interface implemented by LegalPerson, and inherited by Person and Company. LegalPerson obviously has to implement lots of interfaces. :-)

Ignoring the fact that Person is clearly a subclass of Mammal, I like this.

A couple comments:

- the name LegalEntity feels better to me. (I think it's less likely to be confusing to the lawgrammers who'll be maintaing the code).

- Once we have LegalEntity in place, we should consider discarding the Suable typeclass -- it looks to me like LegalEntity perfectly describes what we're looking for.

There's still a lot of refactoring to be done (I still can't believe the CA Vehicle Code considers a person "a natural person, firm, copartnership, association, limited liability company, or corporation."), but now that the types have been cleared up we have a good foundation to move towards.

Things we should consider going forwards:

- Will the constitution refer to Person, or to LegalEntity? ("new Person() == new Person()" has a nice ring to it if you ask me)

- Why can't all LegalEntities be acted upon in the same way? (Some Legal entities can be put in jail for instance). Is there a type we are missing?

Person is clearly a subclass of Mammal

Well, of course we'll need to use multiple inheritance. :-)

we should consider discarding the Suable typeclass

I would recommend keeping it as an interface definition, to make clear that it is a logically distinct thing; LegalEntity would just implement the interface.

Will the constitution refer to Person, or to LegalEntity?

Depends on the context, I would think. Sounds like we'll need plenty of coders to make this work... :-)

Why can't all LegalEntities be acted upon in the same way?

Obviously we haven't defined all the relevant interfaces and subclasses :-). The one you're looking for here is Jailable, which evidently would be implemented by Person but not Company, and so would not be implemented in the LegalEntity base class.

Obvious next question: what language do we start the implementation in? I vote for Python. Anyone for starting a github project?

I suggest we start with the existing concept of a legal person. Lawyers, judges, and legislators already know quite well that a corporation is not a real person, which is why I referred to it as a 'legal fiction' above. The purpose of such a legal fiction is economy, that is not having to have two complete sets for rules for individuals and groups in matters of property, contract, and tort.

I would not begin with your definition above; I just gave a few obvious examples of why corporate personhood makes legal disputes an awful lot simpler for everyone involved, to the point where most people take it for granted. Corporations are the solution to legal problems involving collective action. Their history is intertwined with the development of modern democracy, as groups became a viable alternative to monarchs. If you want to understand the origin of corporations in common law systems, you may as well begin with the City of London Corporation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

Yeah so keep the useful senses of the definition and not the harmful senses (unlimited political speech). This is not paradox inducing.

That's a kind of arbitrary approach. Individuals have unlimited freedom of speech, why shouldn't groups of individuals exercise that same right? I'm rather less rah-rah on the first amendment than most, and would far rather have publicly financed elections, but I can't really see a philosophical problem with Citizens United. Unions (which are specialized corporations) would not take kindly to restriction of their free speech, and CU benefited them as much as any other corporate speaker.

I want democracy to be about human to human negotiation. I don't want the basic unit of our society to be as abstract as one that would include corporations and unions (and computer programs? and other, smaller governments?). Corporations and unions exist to further human endeavors. To the extent that they aid individual humans, those humans will voice their support for higher-order structures. The higher-order structures should always be responsible to the entire field of individuals, and never granted moral status of their own.

Unfortunately, other people want different things. Human to human negotiation gets tricky in larger populations; it's no accident that the American political landscape rapidly became dominated by parties despite the founders' ideals; if a group of people choose to delegate some of their moral authority to an entity like a party or a corporation, it's rather hard to articulate why they should not be able to do so. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

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