entities

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They really don’t. 

To be clear, this is not a post bashing corporations (or government). It’s not really extolling the virtues of corporations, either. Instead, it’s just to make the point that, notwithstanding Citizens United or Hobby Lobby and other cases of their ilk, the idea that corporations are people is still a legal fiction.  A useful and important one, but a fiction nonetheless.  

On April 11, Corey Booker posted the following on Facebook:

In awful years past, corporations polluted the Passaic river to the point that it ended the days where people could eat from it, swim in it, and use it as a thriving recreation source. Today we announced a massive initiative to clean the Passaic river and bring it back to life again. The tremendous clean up effort will create hundreds of jobs and slowly over time restore one of New Jersey’s great rivers to its past strength and glory.

The river needs the clean-up, and I applaud the effort. Still, the reality is corporations did not pollute the Passaic River, at least not literally.  People working for the corporation did. It is agency law that allows a corporation to act in the first place, because the…

As I discussed briefly last week, I think reverse veil piercing in the Hobby Lobby case is a bad idea, in part because it uses a doctrine designed to prevent fraud to impute characteristics to the entity. One of the reasons this concerns me is that there are other recent decisions that imply courts may be missing the point about the separate and distinctive nature of entities, even as the individual rights of entities appear to be expanding. 

In a recent West Virginia case, for example, a lower court allowed a wildly improper use of the statutory provision, “Unknown claims against dissolved corporation” to be the basis what became a $25 million jury award for punitive damages for emotional impact to a former entity’s shareholders. In the Order Addressing AIG Posttrial Motions (pdf) of May 1, 2012 (“Order”) Ryan Environmental, Inc. v. Hess Oil Co., Inc., Civil Action No. 10-C-20, the court adopted a plaintiff’s argument that, under W. Va. Code § 31D-14-1407(d), “the interests of the shareholders are joined with the interests of the corporation after a corporation’s dissolution.” See Order at 7.  The court later explained its view that, because the plaintiff’s former entity was dissolved, damages and hardships attributable to the shareholders were a sufficient basis for the defendants’ liability directly to the shareholders and that such damages and hardships did not need to attributed to the former entity.  That is, the defendants’ liability ran to the entity’s shareholders post-dissolution even though the harms claimed were never attributable to the entity.  Click below to read more.