This volume offers a new point of entry into enduring questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like “personhood” that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution allows the volume to consider together an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Taken together, the book highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change.

The corporation plays a special role in discussions over legal personhood. Whereas advocates for human rights have turned to personhood to offer protection to the vulnerable, corporate personhood confers privileges on already powerful institutions. Nonetheless, attempts to distinguish corporate persons from other persons are beset by problems. This chapter suggests that instead of trying to find the truth of persons, such that we can distinguish real flesh and blood humans from the persona ficta of the corporation, we should take seriously the fictional nature of corporate personhood. The chapter concludes by mapping out two different ways that corporate fictions operate, one in law and the other in literature.

Using a communal approach that employs diverse feminist perspectives, co-authors Anne Choike, Martha Albertson Fineman, and Cheryl L. Wade argue that feminism offers corporate law a vitally important analytical tool to advance the creation of a more just legal framework governing corporations and their stakeholders. Choike, Fineman, and Wade highlight feminist corporate law literature that uses various feminist and feminist-inspired approaches to illuminate how using such perspectives can facilitate critical examination of corporate law concepts (including corporate personhood, limited liability, board diversity, firm ownership, and theories of the firm). Choike, Fineman and Wade argue that each type of feminism offers unique tools to analyze corporate law. Liberal feminism’s focus on gender identity, among other intersectional identity characteristics, reveals corporate law’s inequitable substance and operation. Relational feminism’s attention to gendered values and ethical frameworks highlights their impact upon the role and function of the corporation. Dominance feminism’s focus on power enables critique of implicitly gendered privileges that corporate law confers upon corporate actors. Feminism-inspired universal theories like vulnerability theory transcend gender to consider how institutional relationships in corporate law, such as principal/agent and worker/owner, may be unequal. Professional practitioners, scholars, and students can benefit from this chapter.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).

Christopher Tollefsen addresses institutions’ conscience rights. The Supreme Court’s description in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby of the rights of religious corporations affects that question. Institutional conscience attracts more skepticism than individual conscience. Skeptics wonder if an institution can have a conscience or make others respect it. Some medical institutions, looking to exercise conscience, ask if they should be forced to offer patients all services the law allows, including abortion, sterilization, physician-aided suicide and gender transition. If they don’t, others fear unwanted costs to clients and employees. Hobby Lobby involved a closely-held corporation’s refusal to obey a law mandating the purchase of health insurance covering drugs and devices that could destroy an embryo. In other institutional conscience cases, religion could be exercised by the group-subject’s doing or abstaining from acts, as a group and for religious reasons. As in Hobby Lobby, shielding group conscience claims, through corporations, vindicates humans’ rights to achieve certain ends: business efficiencies and the goods of working as a family and as co-believers.