If corporations are people, can we draft them?
Recent Bluessky Posts- Official CFP for We Robot in Oxford, UK, April 22-24, 2027 is now available at easychair.org/cfp/WR27. Submission deadline is Oct. 5, 2026. Also, AI disclosure requested and "papers may be reviewed by AI detection, whose feedback will be instructive but not determinative." September 8, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- For a chilling analysis of where we stand see Professor Kim Lane Scheppele on "What is a Constitutional Crisis?". And that was almost a year ago! www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-8A... September 8, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- @miamilawschool.bsky.social does a feature on @jotwell.bsky.social, "Jotwell: the journal legal scholars turn to for research that matters" news.miami.edu/law/stories/... September 8, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Private right of action (in court) vs government-must-initiate enforcement (before court or via agency). So the difference from the econ or polisci dichotomy is less than it may seem? September 8, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Is it not the case that as new LLM models are trained on the corpus of academic articles and internet posts, they learn about ways of breaking out of alignment? Plus that "cheating" can help "success"? So shouldn't we expect more and more of it? #AI September 7, 2026 Michael Froomkin
As it doesn’t maximize profits, don’t they have a conscientious objection?
I believe that a close reading of economic policy during world war 2 might reveal that the government had effectively drafted corporations for its wartime objectives.
I’m not so sure about any other period in American history.
It seems to me the more important question is whether they can be sent to jail. When a corporation commits a crime that would get N years in jail for a person, shouldn’t it be fined N years of profits (or perhaps 0.1*N*revenue)?
One side effect of such a rule is that it would provide an incentive for keeping corporations small (a large corporation being more likely to break the law).
I wish we could
They can’t be sent to jail, but can be sued
Sure why not?
Corporations, like families, are made up of people, and the representative who would be voting on behalf of the corporation is already voting in the corporation’s interest when they hit the ballot box.
I believe, they could be.