Law and Magic Blog

Corporations and Magic

Great post from Dale Pendell at the Huffington Post on The Magic of Corporate Personhood, teasing out all sorts of magic imagery in the history of corporate law. Here's an excerpt.

[S]ometimes it is instructive to frame the story in a different, if perhaps more fanciful, way. From a magical perspective, corporate personhood is conjuring--that is, giving a body to a spirit, to an abstract entity. There are three great prototypical shamanistic figures in the Western mythic tradition: Eve, Orpheus, and Faust. Of these three, conjuring is the specialty of the latter, and seems to be the most common form of shamanistic magic in western culture. Philosophically, conjuring is reification--that is, making a "thing" of something abstract.

In traditional ceremonial magic, giving a body to a spirit involves a magic circle (in this case the Court), certain writs and spells ("In the matter of"), and an abundance of smoke and mirrors. Breaking the circle--releasing the conjured spirit into the world at large--marks the magic as "black."

But what sort of spirit or wraith is it that has been conjured? By its magical writ (its "charter"), the corporate spirit's entire purpose is to accumulate monetary profit, without limit. This insatiable quality marks the spirit as a form of what Buddhists call the "hungry ghost," the preta, inhabitants of one of the six realms of existence. Hungry ghosts are beings with such huge appetites, with such swollen bellies and with such narrow throats, that they live in a state of perpetual craving. Zen Buddhists make a small grain offering to the hungry ghosts at every meal, as a gesture of compassion, to try to relieve some of their suffering.

A fascinating way to rethink history, economics, and law, whether or not one agrees.

Business Law and the Rhetoric of Magic

Ron C. Chen, then at the U. S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, and Jon D. Hanson, Harvard Law School, published "The Illusion of Law: The Legitimating Schemas of Modern Policy and Corporate Law," at 103 Michigan Law Review 1 (2004). 

This Article is about some of the schemas and scripts that form and define our lives. It is about the knowledge structures that shape how we view the world and how we understand the limitless information with which we are always confronted.

This Article is also about the "evolution of ideas" underlying corporate law and all of modern policymaking. It is about the ways in which schemas and scripts have influenced how policy theorists, policymakers, lawyers, and many others (particularly in the West) understand and approach policymaking generally and corporate law specifically. It is about both the invisibility and blinding effect of those schemas. It is about the battle over those schemas and the prizes of victory. And, finally, it is about how the now-dominant schemas render us the "unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."

We begin our discussion in Part II with the dominant knowledge structures underlying modern policymaking, describing the emergence of what we term the "meta script" of policymaking - or the schemas that frame our approach to policy analysis today. Part III turns to the law regulating large commercial interests - specifically, corporate law - and examines the emergence and dominance of the new "macro script" of corporate law. It examines the schemas that identify and legitimate the purpose of the law. Parts IV and V highlight the signs of illusion in those schemas and then begin to unveil the situational magician behind those illusions. Corporate law works, as all illusions work, by relying on a set of schemas that guide our attention and inferences and play into our intuitions and motives. Yet the outcome and response that this Article suggests is neither so benign nor light-hearted as that of a magic show. While its analysis is concentrated on corporate law, the Article's implications reach each of us, from law student to legal scholar, citizen to policymaker, and reveal something unsettling: all of us are susceptible to schematic sleight-of-hand, tricks that render us vulnerable to dangerous illusion. Where many have heretofore tended to see magic, this Article reveals the illusion of law and some of the unseen mechanisms that make it possible.

Download the article at the link.

Mr. Hanson also blogged some of the article at The Situationist. See also the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.