Should Corporations Be Treated as Individuals?

Corporations must be treated as corporations, for many purposes, in order to preserve the rights and protect the interests of the persons involved with them. Owners, customers, employees, and creditors would all be worse off if corporations were not treated by courts as persons.

Why are corporations treated as individuals?

Treating corporations as having legal rights allows corporations to sue and to be sued, provides a single entity for easier taxation and regulation, simplifies complex transactions that would otherwise involve, in the case of large corporations, thousands of people, and protects the individual rights of the ...

Should corporations have the same rights and responsibilities as natural persons?

Corporations cannot have exactly the same rights as individuals, nor should they. Even as he explained the traditional view that a corporation is a kind of legal person, Hamilton acknowledged that certain kinds of legal rights cannot attach to such a person.