Functional Theory of Corporate Rights - Analysis of Winkler

The article analyzes the concept of corporate personhood based on the work of Adam Winkler, pointing to the common error of equating legal personality with moral and constitutional personality. The author argues that a corporation is not a person in the metaphysical sense, but a functional organizational technology that allows for the stable management of assets and liabilities. Instead of asking whether a corporation "is a person," the text proposes a right-by-right analysis approach—examining each right individually in terms of its function and purpose. In this way, corporate rights appear not as granting citizenship to a new class of beings, but as a mosaic of specific competencies and legal protections that do not have to be identical to the rights granted to humans.