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The aim of this section is primarily descriptive in order to show that the corporate form is a legal creation of the state to serve the socio-economic goals of government. I shall look at the development of the corporate legal form from the first companies granted Royal Charter in the fifteenth century to the modern corporate legal form of today. The legal and economic development of the corporation reflects the role it has played in society and helps us understand the role the corporation plays in our society today. Interestingly, the evolution of corporate law is paralleled by a legal debate over the nature of the corporation which is reminiscent of the debate over corporate moral agency. The legal debate is primarily between three different positions; those who regard the corporation as a legal fiction, those who regard it as a nexus-of-contracts, and those who regard it as a real entity in a metaphysical sense. The influence of this debate on legislation shows the practical importance of the metaphysical status that we deem the corporation to have. I will be defending the view of the corporation as a legal fiction against both the views of the corporation as a nexus-of-contracts and the corporation conceived as a real entity.

The doctrine of informed consent functions reasonably within its area of applicability of competent adults, though even in that setting it suffers from some difficulties both theoretical and practical. When applied by proxy to incompetent persons such as mentally incapacitated adults and newborn babies, the doctrine becomes a legal fiction, i.e., a legal construct created to force-fit a set of facts into an established legal analysis that is not literally applicable. The conceptual, ethical and practical difficulties are maximized with proxy permission to authorize circumcision of neonates. “Proxy consent” for neonatal circumcision is a legal fiction that cloaks a usurpation of agency allowing ostensibly hallowed principles of autonomy and self-determination to be violated with impunity. Such legal fictions conceal our violations from ourselves and others under the pretenses of legal authorization and compliance with ethics and human rights, and—in the circumcision context—the further pretense of medical authorization, masking our failure to properly safeguard human dignity and autonomy.

The European Monetary System, which came into being on 13 March, 1979, clearly demonstrated — both in the Resolution of the Council of Ministers of 5 December 1978 — as well as in the mechanisms used in the System — fundamental economic and monetary aims which had been missing from its predecessor. Thus, the author discerns the following aims in the EMS: (i) a greater degree of convergence of the economies of the participating Member States, (ii) the adoption of a common public policy choice for these countries — more specifically — the control of levels of inflation — also aiming at convergence, (iii) exchange-rate stability, (iv) the promotion of a central role for the ECU, and, (v) hopefully some moves to a greater degree of integration among the Community’s Member States.