Legal benefits of ‘artificial people’ abound but poorly-defined limits or repercussions for malfeasance risks an imbalance of power. Photograph: Blutgruppe/ Blutgruppe/zefa/Corbis
There are, it turns out, more types of people in the world than we could have dreamed of.

There are mere mortals like you and me, the kind of persons who come into this world, red-faced, kicking and hollering and then exit again, usually a few score years later. To lawyers and the supreme court, we’re known as “natural persons”.