

Motorist Claims Corporation Papers Are Carpool Passengers - patricktomas
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/corporation-carpool-flap/

======
bcherry
Carpool Lane: "2 or more persons per vehicle"

CA Vehicle Code: '"Person" includes a natural person, firm, copartnership,
association, limited liability company, or corporation.'
(<http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d01/vc470.htm>)

Pretty reasonable argument in the abstract.

But I don't think that the Articles of Incorporation should be considered a
physical manifestation of that corporation, so I don't see how you could claim
that the corporation was "in the vehicle".

~~~
dasil003
On the other hand if he's the sole board member and the articles and his
laptop with all the work were in the car, how could it _not_ be in the car ;)

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ChuckMcM
I thought it was a clever way to gain standing in order to litigate. While it
might get the guy off a quick clarification in the Ca law would close the
loophole. As a publicity stunt to drive the conversation about rights versus
rights assignable entities it seems to have achieved that objective.

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malandrew
Given his intent with this, I would love something like this to make it to the
SCOTUS, since the granting of personhood to corporations is absurd and needs
to be overruled. Giving a corporation personhood gives it all the rights of
being a person with none of the consequences. You can't jail a corporation
like you can with people.

~~~
anigbrowl
So when you need to make a contract with a corporation, who will you make it
with? When you want to sue one, who will you sue? The individual officers? How
are you going to prove they were responsible? If you sue the CEO because of
something his subordinates did, and he dies 6 months later, what would happen
to your legal action?

The legal fiction of corporate personhood exists for a good reason; it allows
parties external to the corporation to transact business with and take action
against the corporation without needing to know the individual structure of
it. It's called a _corporation_ because _corpore_ is the Latin for body,
giving it a distinct legal identity.

~~~
dlss
> When you want to sue one, who will you sue?

Okay, since I'm sensing this is about to become a type theory conversation,
let's start with the function definition:

sue :: Person -> Claim -> Person -> Maybe Money

Now you're basically saying that, given the above definition, we have _no
choice_ but to have Company implement the Person typeclass. Unfortunately,
there is a lot of code already using the Person typeclass for purposes that
are absurd when a Corporation is passed. Consider:

valid_for_carpool :: [Person] -> Boolean

So what to do? One option is to send out emails telling our colleagues to be
very careful when using the Person typeclass. The other option is to create a
new Suable typeclass, and implement it for both corporations and people.

Which one do you prefer?

~~~
pdonis
_have Company implement the Person typeclass_

The obvious solution is to factor out a base class, LegalPerson, with some but
not all of the behaviors of the existing Person class. Then derive a separate
Company class from LegalPerson. All the stuff we don't want corporations to
have, we leave in the existing Person class, so Company doesn't have it.

 _create a new Suable typeclass_

I would view "Suable" as an interface implemented by LegalPerson, and
inherited by Person and Company. LegalPerson obviously has to implement _lots_
of interfaces. :-)

~~~
dlss
Ignoring the fact that Person is clearly a subclass of Mammal, I like this.

A couple comments:

\- the name LegalEntity feels better to me. (I think it's less likely to be
confusing to the lawgrammers who'll be maintaing the code).

\- Once we have LegalEntity in place, we should consider discarding the Suable
typeclass -- it looks to me like LegalEntity perfectly describes what we're
looking for.

There's still a lot of refactoring to be done (I still can't believe the CA
_Vehicle_ Code considers a person "a natural person, firm, copartnership,
association, limited liability company, or corporation."), but now that the
types have been cleared up we have a good foundation to move towards.

Things we should consider going forwards:

\- Will the constitution refer to Person, or to LegalEntity? ("new Person() ==
new Person()" has a nice ring to it if you ask me)

\- Why can't all LegalEntities be acted upon in the same way? (Some Legal
entities can be put in jail for instance). Is there a type we are missing?

~~~
pdonis
_Person is clearly a subclass of Mammal_

Well, of course we'll need to use multiple inheritance. :-)

 _we should consider discarding the Suable typeclass_

I would recommend keeping it as an interface definition, to make clear that it
is a logically distinct thing; LegalEntity would just implement the interface.

 _Will the constitution refer to Person, or to LegalEntity?_

Depends on the context, I would think. Sounds like we'll need plenty of coders
to make this work... :-)

 _Why can't all LegalEntities be acted upon in the same way?_

Obviously we haven't defined all the relevant interfaces and subclasses :-).
The one you're looking for here is Jailable, which evidently would be
implemented by Person but not Company, and so would not be implemented in the
LegalEntity base class.

Obvious next question: what language do we start the implementation in? I vote
for Python. Anyone for starting a github project?

------
zoowar
Throw them _both_ in jail.

