Book Review: The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice

Abstract

unethically-produced tchotchkes from China for a song—a markedly less pious proposition if we take the spirit, and not the letter, of almost everything Jesus ever said—also indicate the corporation’s intentions. In other words, although Hobby Lobby’s directors say the corporate person is Christian, the meaning of its actions speak louder than its words; when the question “why?” is given application, for certain company actions, to use Anscombe’s interrogative, a resounding “for profit!” (not “for Christ”) will no doubt be the answer. Hence when a company’s directors tell us what a particular corporate action means, it ought to matter as much to the calculus of the corporate person’s intention as when we are told a toilet is a fountain, a work of art, or something different altogether. Such a move has the potential to give a radical new meaning to robber baron Andrew Carnegie’s famous credo “My heart is in the work”. At its heart, however, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons is a genealogy of a legal concept read through the lens of the aesthetic revolution that occurred simultaneously. It admirably weaves together sustained analyses of case law, legal philosophy, and literature. Scholars interested in legal history, intellectual history, or jurisprudence, will find much to interest them here, though it is principally a work of literary criticism. As a former corporate lawyer, I admit I would have liked to have seen more engagement with the corporate form and regulation as it developed. Admittedly board resolutions, articles of incorporation, and meeting minutes hardly make for good literature, though I do wonder whether we can take a corporation to mean what it says on its papers, the papers to which it owes its ‘incorporate’ existence, or whether we can take a corporation to intend the decisions that are protected by the business judgment rule, a rule that protects officers and directors from liability when they have made poor decisions in good faith. Neither of these aspects of corporate organization and operation receives sustained attention here, at least in a formal legal sense. These aspects are only indirectly related to Siraganian’s endeavor, however. Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons questions, critiques, and enriches our understanding of how a collective can, by the magic of some abstract formal conceit, made material and stored in a warehouse in Delaware, act as if it were unified and natural. Because literature is, mercifully, “[r]elieved of the conditions of expediency, efficiency, and conclusiveness that law necessarily imposes on itself” (3), it affords an opportunity to inquire into the epistemological authority for law’s ontological claims of the corporate person, whether it intends, and what it means.