Corporations and the Corpus Christi

In an interview on Ken Myers’ Mars Hill audio magazine, Lew Daly comments on the failure of American law to recognize the reality of groups.  Corporations are recognized as legal persons endowed with rights, but other groups are not.  This gives corporations enormous legal clout in contest with individuals, even if those individuals band together; and it is evidence that American public life is rooted in individualistic assumptions.

Daly cites Harold Berman’s discussion of corporation law in the medieval period, where Berman notes that, in contrast to Roman law, a corporation in Christendom was not dependent on a grant from the state.  Rather, “any group of persons with the requisite structure and purpose . . . constituted a corporation.”  As corporations, the church and its associations were capable of receiving gifts, were recognized to have property rights and the right to contract, and the capacity to act through representatives.

With this shift in the legal meaning of “corporation,” it’s not surprising that the corporation now holds something close to the cultural and political weight that the church once had.