Limited Poetic Liability
Of all the corporate person’s vital qualities, the most powerful and contentious was limited liability: the rule that a corporation’s shareholders cannot be held responsible for more than the value of the shares they own. This chapter examines challenges to that rule and its effects in the world by analyzing the responses of three very different writers: law professor Maurice Wormser, novelist Theodore Dreiser, and poet and lawyer Charles Reznikoff. Should corporations be understood as veils for individuals or as fully formed entities inextricably meshed with their managers, owners, and environment? Each writer struggled to know a corporate person behind its “entity veil” (as Wormser terms it), coming to see that limited liability functioned to minimize the essential duties of managers, employees, and owners. While Wormser recommends “veil piercing” when corporations are taken over by nefarious individuals, Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) uncovers problems with this strategy, and Reznikoff’s epic poem Testimony (1965–78), maps out systemic injuries that limited liability generated. Dreiser and Reznikoff deploy literary form to think about this corporate person precisely when it did not acknowledge all of its attributes as a legal person. When the corporate person devolved and acted more like a tool or machine, how was society supposed to treat it? This chapter’s three conceptual explorations of corporate limited liability shine light on the legal system’s deficiencies when contending with the corporation’s social role. Each writer begins, in his own way, to envision solutions other than strictly legal remedies.