GEORGIA LAW REVIEW - StephanKinsella.com

CORPORATIONS AND RIGHTS
"public good" criterion.204 If governments are not justified in using
individuals for the public good, then certainly private corporations
are not.
Such straightforward examples of forced association are too obvious
to require elaboration here. What I want to do instead is touch
briefly upon the two more subtle forms of interference (or potential
interference) that have generated so much discussion in recent
years, endangerment and nuisance, especially as this last involves
environmental issues. Once again, these are large subjects; my purpose
here is simply to draw the general outline that is prescribed by
the theory of rights, which might then serve as background for more
detailed legal analysis.
As we saw earlier,205 the problem of endangerment arises in principle
whenever individuals perform positive acts in the proximity of
others. (I will use "endangerment" and "risk" rather than the more
subjective "fear" in order to suggest that I am talking here about a
phenomenon with some real basis in fact.) In the corporate context,
the acts that endanger often do so by creating conditions or products
that endanger, conditions affecting workers, say, or homeowners
living near industrial complexes, or products that may harm consumers.
Thus the causal sequence is often complex, involving an
intervening act of the victim, or of some thi~d party, or of nature
(which may or may not serve to negative liability, depending upon
the complex rules of liability in such cases). Yet we allow a good
many of these individual and corporate acts and the risky conditions
they create; otherwise, life in reasonable proximity with each other
would cease. What we want to know, then, at least in general outline,
is how the theory of rights orders this problem. Just what rights
and obligations are there in the matter?
What is required in general, recall, is that acts or conditions not
take what others own. As the acts of one person increasingly involve
risk for others, these others are to some corresponding degree unable
to make peaceful use of what they own, even if the risk does not in
fact materialize. But there is a large subjective element in all of this;
moreover, the issues are context-specific, varying greatly from, say,
nuclear power plant risks to products liability cases (and greatly in
turn within this last category). We are faced, then, with a very
difficult and complex line-drawing problem: in principle there are
m4 Cf, Eldridge v. Smith, 34 Vt. 484, 492-93 (1861).
205 See notes 85 & 86 and accompanying text supra.