The concept is a "legal person", which means there's a whole host of things corporations can do.

The big ones being that they can be sued and charged for breaking the law, you can't do either of those things with, say, a rock or a dog.

They can also sue you back which is, admittedly, less fun.

All very true, but at the risk of laboring the point, a legal person is not a person, just like a sperm bank is not a bank. A noun phrase is not necessarily a sub-category of the original noun. This is underlined by the use of the plural “legal persons”, rather “legal people” which is usually reserved for meat sacks with law degrees.

> A noun phrase is not necessarily a sub-category of the original noun.

This is actually something I had not fully considered. I had always considered odd modifiers to create a non-central example of the category, rather than creating a new category.

To take your example of a sperm bank, I had always considered that to be a kind of generalized version of a bank. A general "place you can deposit things for future use".

Do you have any other good examples? I'm gonna have to let this roll around in my head for a bit to see what the implications are.

One confounding factor is that some words have multiple meanings or connotations. A "bank" doesn't have to be a financial bank. Or sometimes names can be chained together, like maybe "sperm bank" is based on "food bank" or "seed bank".

Alright, so I finally went and checked, and (according to merriam webster), the following definitions of "bank" are reasonably commonly used (none marked with archaic or obscure).

> a supply of something held in reserve

> a place where something is held available (especially : a depot for the collection and storage of a biological product)

Both of which fit food bank, seed bank, and sperm bank.

Which means that a sperm bank probably is properly a bank, although used without qualification, most people probably mean money bank (or are being intentionally ambiguous to avoid the stigma of needing a food bank/going to a sperm bank).

Accoring to the citizens united finding, their rights extend to free speech (and specifically to otherwise-illegal political speech), and therefore presumably this law.

> can’t marry another person

Don't you dare dash my dreams of getting married to Costco.