Thanks Kotodama! Interesting comment. First, I agree with you that in some respects we treat corporations too much like human beings, when, for instance, we grant them rights under the Free Exercise Clause or perhaps when we grant them political speech rights under the First Amendment. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to treat corporations as legal persons as a general matter, because they are simply aggregations of individual human beings, namely, the shareholders. If people can have rights and obligations, then why should not associations of people be able to have rights and obligations? Corporations, whether business corporations or other incorporated associations of people, were a major step forward in our history because they allowed people to aggregate their interests in an important way (and to shield themselves from individual legal liabilities, of course!)

Now, what about non-human animals? Of course no one says that a hippo is just like a person in every respect. And everyone should agree that animals have a moral status that inanimate things do not, so that it is wrong, for example, to be cruel to an animal. And everyone should also bear in mind that there are difficult questions about when human beings do or do not satisfy the usual criteria for personhood, e.g., fetuses, newborns, people in irreversible comas, people who have suffered brain-death, etc. I think there are three important things going on:

1. A hippo can’t have duties in the way that a person does, i.e., it can’t be morally responsible in the way a person is.
2. A case like the one I’ve written about here is a very good example of the way in which advocates for animal personhood are really trying to advance their own interests, or what they think are the interests of the world at large, rather than the interests of the hippos. If the hippos could speak, do you think they would make the same demands their lawyer is making? Hardly. In a legal sense, saying “animals are people” in this kind of litigation is just a way of saying, “I, a lawyer with an interest in the environment, say, have standing to bring claims in court to try to accomplish what I cannot accomplish politically.”
3. Law is a human institution, made by humans for humans.

Maybe you would find this post from 2018 interesting. Curious to hear your reactions!