Rights, Persons and Organizations: A Legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society

In Rights, Persons, and Organizations, Meir Dan-Cohen undertakes an important task: the development of a jurisprudence of organizations. He rightly points out that prevailing legal theory is ultimately based on a two-tier conception of society that comprehends only individuals and government. This model of political individualism tends either to personify organizations, investing them with the same rights and responsibilities as individuals, or to dissolve them into a mere aggregation of individuals that lacks independent jurisprudential significance. This approach, however, fails to address the distinctive and important characteristics of organizations such as corporations, labor unions, partnerships, educational, religious, and charitable institutions, cooperatives, and advocacy groups. Professor Dan-Cohen seeks to correct this deficiency by offering a legal theory that includes organizations. His effort is worthy and timely. In the past two decades we have experienced the limitations of governmental centralization on the one hand, and of outright deregulation and devolution on the other. De Tocqueville's insights concerning the importance of intermediating institutions in a pluralist democracy have special contemporary relevance. We need an enriched jurisprudence that is more responsive to those insights.