Corporations are pieces of paper we've scribbled on. Because they are pieces of paper, they cannot be harmed.

This is the primary difference between corporations and people.

People can be harmed through the pieces of paper they've scribbled on. That is material. But do not mistake that for the paper being harmed. It can't be. It's just a piece of paper.

No, it's just a piece of paper.

Yes, rights/laws/norms/etc are legal fiction. Harm is material. Without harm, there's not much purpose to a legal system. A bad legal system lets someone harm someone else, and then wave around a piece of paper saying "Oh, it was this piece of paper that did it, not me, I'm not responsible!"

A good legal system recognizes that that's absurd. We currently play along far too much, and Citizens United was a breaking point for many people.

Even in our broken legal system, we recognize this fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.

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.

It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?

If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.

> 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.

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.

You can act in your capacity as a person and exercise your rights, taking on personal liability.

You can act via a fictive legal proxy, which has no rights and shield yourself from some liability.

Trying to blur those two is madness.

Corporations aren't people and don't have rights or votes.

If you want to have a say in the way a place is run, you can do so in your capacity as a person.

If you want to do so from a legal fiction "proxy", fuck off.

> “Each country is free to regulate their borders,” Mr. Baptiste acknowledged. But he said the scientist’s case was “extraordinarily atypical” and a “subject of concern.”

I'm inclined to believe that they think this is atypical. How did he "attempt to conceal" it?

We've unfortunately conflated this, to our detriment. Legal fictions don't have rights. People do.

Directors of Widget Corp can group together separately from Widget Corp and exercise their personal rights, or they can fuck off. Widget Corp isn't a person and has no rights.