GEORGIA LAW REVIEW - StephanKinsella.com

1322 GEORGIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 13: 1245
their corporation they cannot exercise their right to marry, for ex-
ample, or their right to vote, or to have children. But they can
certainly buy and sell through this association, or exercise their
rights of speech, or give to charity, or perform through it whatever
other activity such an institution lends itself to, provided that they
as individuals have a right to perform that activity. Yet this is not
the whole story either, for the rights of the corporation are limited
finally to those rights the corporate owners in fact have given it. If
the corporate owners have included in their articles of incorporation
certain limitations upon the activities of their corporation, then the
corporation has no right to perform activities inconsistent with
those limitations. In sum, then, the rights of the corporation are
limited to the rights the corporate cjwners have to give to it (or to
exercise through it), to the rights they can give to it, and to the
rights they do give to it.
This much, in brief, explains what it means to say that the corpo-
ration has rights, by locating those rights ultimately in the corpora-
tion's owners, as entailments of the individual rights of those own-
ers. (In subsection 3 below, when we turn to the internal relation-
ships of the corporation, we will have to refine this picture some-
what.) Moreover, in thus locating and deriving the corporation's
rights, this explication goes far, in conjunction with the theory de-
veloped in Part 111, toward justifying them. Yet as we saw at the
outset of Part 11, it is not uncommon to find reservations about this
idea that there is a right of individuals to collective ownership and
action-expressed most often as a fear of the attendant power.la6 To
this we need simply ask how it could be otherwise. If an individual
has a certain body of rights against the rest of the world-including
the rights of ownership and action-does he lose some of those rights
when he acts in concert with others? Do two people, when acting
together, have fewer rights (or more obligations) than one person
acting alone?18' Surely, power (the additional power that attends
joint action) has no place in this analysis: if it did then powerful
individuals could be said to have fewer rights than weak ones!
Rights simply do not work that way: they go with individuals as
such-powerful or weak-even when those individuals act in asso-
ciation with others. (Is there any relevant difference between an
individuals's right to speak and a group's right to speak?) As we saw
lRR See also note 151 supra. .&
IX7 See note 18 supra.