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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (64498)	5/8/2008 3:32:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543554

The concept goes back at least to the 1800s. I think to a lesser extent it goes back further than that but there where not many corporations before that time, and there hadn't been time for legal decisions and doctrines to solidify the concept. If you wanted to have protections and legal rights for the corporate owners collective action, you would have to replace a lot of common law and legal tradition with new legislation, I imagine it would be very political, messy and difficult. Most people who want to abolish legal personhood (and the related but not identical concept of limited liability) want it abolished and NOT replaced with some separate complex web of protections for the joint actions of the individuals. They want corporations and their shareholders to be more open to various sorts of attacks, and less able to defend themselves against such attacks. They are quite vocal about it, and if you try searching google on the issue of corporate personhood most of the links go to sites, blog posts, articles, etc. arguing for the elimination of these doctrines. It makes it hard to find a site with good, reasonably objective, detail about the very early development of the doctrine.