Published on May 31, 2013

Suitably organized, corporate groups mimic the capacities of individual persons and operate as agents with minds of their own. And in order to function in this agential manner, they have to be assigned legal rights that they can assert or transfer or waive in their dealings with others. But corporate bodies do not have a claim to rights on the same basis as individuals and neither, consequently, do they have a claim to the same range of rights. Notwithstanding their functional similarity to natural persons, they should be denied anything like the same status in law.Presented by Philip Pettit, L.S.Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values, Princeton University, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University. This talk, the 2013 Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy, was recorded on February 28, 2013.