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13 - Corporate Personhood as Legal and Literary Fiction

from Part IV - Conceptual Origins and Lineages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 February 2024

By
Joshua Barkan
Edited by
Melissa J. Durkee
Melissa J. Durkee
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

The corporation plays a special role in discussions over legal personhood. Whereas advocates for human rights have turned to personhood to offer protection to the vulnerable, corporate personhood confers privileges on already powerful institutions. Nonetheless, attempts to distinguish corporate persons from other persons are beset by problems. This chapter suggests that instead of trying to find the truth of persons, such that we can distinguish real flesh and blood humans from the persona ficta of the corporation, we should take seriously the fictional nature of corporate personhood. The chapter concludes by mapping out two different ways that corporate fictions operate, one in law and the other in literature.

Keywords

Legal PersonhoodCorporate PersonhoodLegal FictionsHuman RightsCorporate PrivilegesFictional Nature of Corporate PersonhoodLaw and Literature
Type
Chapter
Information
States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions
Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities
 , pp. 261 - 282
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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