* This usage began in sixteenth-century England, when lawyers for the East India Company argued that their corporation could not be convicted of a crime because the corporation was not a person and English laws regulating criminal behavior always began with, “No person shall...” In response to this, legislators from that time on began passing laws to specifically regulate the “artificial persons” of corporations. While they wanted to regulate corporations, they also wanted to acknowledge that corporations shared some things with humans: they were taxed, were subject to laws, and could be parties to lawsuits.