Machen defined legal personhood through liability and punishability, not rights.

Evidence

What does it mean for something to be, from the perspective of law, a “person”? Machen begins by following Maitland, suggesting that, legally, personhood is “not a rational, living creature similar to a man, but a mere ‘subject of rights,’” not something inherently equivalent to a human being. If a corporation is a “subject of rights,” then under the law, it could be considered a person. But Machen complicates this simple understanding of personhood: in practice, personhood is not about rights but liabilities, which are found in an ability to understand punishment for violation of law. For Machen, morality and rationality are central for understanding one’s legal position. A person, for Machen, must be something the state can punish and something that acts in a way that grasps the potential of punishment. Thus, Machen concludes, “the proposition ‘A corporation is a person’ is either a mere metaphor or is a fiction of law.” Although corporations, Machen argues, are real, they cannot be considered persons because of the absence of morality and rationality. A corporation cannot, in and of itself, understand particular actions as punishable by law, because it lacks the moral faculty of judgment. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 382

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: The liability-based definition of legal personhood is central to the Corpocene’s inversion (a person becomes a firm).
• XREF: Legal personhood as liability (not rights) reconnects to the reader’s labor theory of value line: what is realized/punished.

Related

• Legal personhood rests on punishability and moral judgment, which corporations lack (similarity 0.96)
• Machen held corporations exist as real entities without inherent personhood. (similarity 0.84)
• Corporate personhood is a legal fiction defined by its consequences, not ontology (similarity 0.81)
• Dewey defined legal personhood pragmatically by its social consequences. (similarity 0.81)