Corporate personhood and the corporate body: the case of former energy giant Enron on trial for fraud

Abstract

This paper queries the concept of corporate personhood by investigating how metaphors of the body were deployed in court testimony during Enron's corporate fraud trial in 2006. Two distinct metaphors are discussed as they relate to representations of the corporation: the portrayal of Enron as an organic body in ill health and death, and the metonymic positioning of the former CEOs as Enron. Drawing from critical economic geographies and legal literatures on the attribution of corporate personhood, I ask, what are the implications of these metaphorical associations for how we understand who has access to the legal rights of corporations? In answering this, I suggest that for the defense, body metaphors contributed to a naturalization of corporate personhood, upholding its legal protections and claiming those protections for the former CEOs. The prosecution rejected this singular metaphorical corporate body, opting for a corporation that was diffuse and occupied by many. From this, I argue that these diverging representations denaturalize corporate personhood, calling into question who has access to its protections in a criminal court. Furthermore, such diverging metaphorical uses of the corporation as a body reaffirm the contested and constructed nature of legal personhood.