Rights, Persons, and Organizations: A Legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society (Second Edition)

Corporations have legal rights, and so do many other large-scale organizations. But what does it mean to ascribe rights and "personhood" to such entities, and what is the rationale for doing so? These are central questions for an organizational society such as ours, and yet they have received consistently little attention in modern political and legal thought. The surface metaphor of treating corporations as persons with "rights" carries profound consequences--sometimes even reducing indivi...