The Myth of Corporate Personhood

A corporation is not a person: although I obviously do not have knowledge of the full range of jurisprudence on this issue, there seems to be little ground to support the notion that a corporation is a person. There is legislation in place, section 15(1) of the CBCA and section 30 of the BCBCA, that gives corporations some relationship to a person, but these do equate the corporate form to an actual person. The most that can be said is that a corporation is like a person, in certain circumstances, when acting in certain ways.

I say this not expecting it to be a groundbreaking revelation – I think we all probably understand the metaphor – but rather because I think referring to corporations as persons undermines our ability to understand them (and from there, regulate them – though people’s’ opinions will vary on that point). First, from a purely psychological perspective, I think granting something the status of “person” draws a connection between human persons and that form. In this case, people empathize and relate with the corporate form because they view them as people, and worthy of the same basic respect and dignity we would afford our fellow humans.

In the second, more pernicious respect, conflating corporations with persons hinders our ability to analyze the traits of the corporate form. For instance, section 30 of the BCBCA gives corporations “the capacity and the rights, powers and privileges” of a person. Notably, it does not give corporations the “duties and obligations” of a person. Instead, the suggestion is that the obligations and duties of a corporation must come from a source external to that of the metaphor. I would suggest that the rights, powers and privileges of the corporation exist externally to the metaphor, as well.

Despite the fact that corporations are creatures of law, would removing the law remove the corporation? Or would the actual human relationships held in place by the legal corporate form reconstitute themselves anew, and continue to absorb the world around them, like a tremendous and terrible blob? The answer to the corporate problem lies not in the legal framework, but the social.