Recently a leading presidential candidate told a group of hecklers in an unguarded moment,”Corporations are people.”
The primary philosophical guideline of the Law Office of Bruce Godfrey is the exact opposite concept, namely, that people are people and that nothing else in the world is morally entitled to the dignity of “people.” This is a “personalist view” supported by leftists like Ralph Nader and conservatives like the late Pope John Paul II and former Czech president Vaclav Havel.
Corporations are not people; people don’t pick their parents or their children by committee, don’t have unlimited life or limited liability, don’t create music, don’t develop religious or counter-religious convictions and cannot spin off their arm, their liver or their knee-cap into a new “person” for convenience. Corporations are important to the economy, but people through governments created them – NOT the other way around.
Corporations have legal duties to maximize shareholder value; for publicly traded corporations, the heroic self-sacrifice that sometimes characterizes military life or emergency responder teams is often illegal because it can hurt stockholders. While the government can certainly kill people in war or through the death penalty, only people can create more people; governments can create corporations, but corporations are not people.
People come first at the Law Office of Bruce Godfrey because the law firm is committed to its values as a Human-Centered Law Practice. We do business with corporations here, but corporations are not people and publicly traded companies are not clients of this Law Office. We do not use the privileges of Maryland law license to support, defend or augment the goals and priorities of corporate life; we decline to extend the use of our attorney privileges for those purposes.
This is a human-centered law firm; if you are a human, you are welcome to contact us for your needs. If you are a human being who owns and runs a small business, incorporated or not, we may well be able to help you. But we only help humans here, because only humans are people.
