section_path: Personhood
section_name: Personhood
paragraph_text: Personhood
  
  Despite not being human beings, corporations have been ruled legal persons in a few countries, and have many of the same rights as natural persons do. For example, a corporation can own property, and can sue or be sued for as long as it exists. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations. Corporations can be "dissolved" either by statutory operation, the order of the court, or voluntary action on the part of shareholders. Insolvency may result in a form of corporate failure, when creditors force the liquidation and dissolution of the corporation under court order, but it most often results in a restructuring of corporate holdings. Corporations can even be convicted of special criminal offenses in the UK, such as fraud and corporate manslaughter. However, corporations are not considered living entities in the way that humans are.
  
  Legal scholars and others, such as Joel Bakan, have observed that a business corporation created as a "legal person" has a psychopathic personality because it is required to elevate its own interests above those of others even when this inflicts major risks and grave harms on the public or on other third-parties. Such critics note that the legal mandate of the corporation to focus exclusively on corporate profits and self-interest often victimizes employees, customers, the public at large, and/or the natural resources. The political theorist David Runciman notes that corporate personhood forms a fundamental part of the modern history of the idea of the state, and believes the idea of the corporation as legal persons can help to clarify the role of citizens as political stakeholders, and to break down the sharp conceptual dichotomy between the state and the people or the individual, a distinction that, on his account, is "increasingly unable to meet the demands placed on the state in the modern world".