DU Poll: Third Way or FDR?

[JDPriestly]

41. A corporation does not need to be called a person in order to be sued.

Corporations are the creation of laws. You just write a law that says that a corporation is subject to a lawsuit. No need to consider it a person. It is not a person. A person is a human.

Corporations have not human rights. None at all other than what are granted them by law.

Other business forms including partnerships and limited liability companies can also be sued. A partnership is considered a person for some persons. I find that use of the term person to be detrimentally confusing.. We should stop using it in that way.

A corporation is the creation of our laws. We can limit them any way we agree to do. They do not have intrinsic rights by virtue of their birth. Their "birth" is a matter of filing papers. Done it. Been there.

I've also given births to children. The difference is palpable. Filing papers to create a corporation is not nearly the experience that creating and raising children is. And the filing of those papers to start a corporation is not nearly the labor and pain that giving birth to a person is.

It's a matter of semantics and not using the word "person" to refer to a business entity. Corporations do not have personality. They do not suffer as people do.

Traditionally and in the general usage, the word "people," by the way, is and was the plural of person. When I was growing up we did not use the word "persons" to refer to people, not in ordinary speech. And no one would every refer to a group of corporations as people.

This is just a matter of language. But using person to refer to corporations has caused a lot of legal mistakes in our country so I think we should change our laws and not use the term to refer to corporations.