It's a very estimable post, but unfortunately not all that definitive to people who are not married to the present-day nomenclature, who are not religious about rules made up by politicians, and who want to look at the concepts analytically...

Eskimos are said to have an unusually high number of words for "snow" (supposedly - it's not a very rational cliche). Likewise, lawyers have an unusually high number of words for "corporation", where the variations between them (and far more variations are possible) are ultimately details of what's in the contract.

As long as the logic of Rights is not violated (Rights cannot be created or destroyed, but can be combined or signed away), the contractual entity / legal body / "corporation" can exist without a monopoly on law enforcement. And if this logic is violated, which can only be done by the force of this coercive monopoly, then such an entity should not exist in the first place.

All the details you've mentioned (who has access to hotel rooms, which accounts are shared to what degree, etc) is a matter of policy that holds validity on the basis of the contract. If a liability arises (ex. a meth lab found in the hotel basement, spewing pollution fumes) then the liabilities are also a matter of contract - whether each of the damaged parties signed away their Right to compensation, and whether the owners agreed to share responsibility in some specific way. (There has to be some default implicit way of sharing liability between the owners if they didn't explicitly state such a way in the contract.)

I know that having so much contractual code can seem complicated, but I must again compare it to software code - most people don't write all their own software, but install common components with possibly some tweaking. Likewise, most businesses would use preexisting contractual policy "modules" which can be summarized rather quickly (ex. "Lawsteinian Partnership with a Motel-6 Liability module").

I would also compare the current government-shaped legal language to an archaic programming language with all the worst qualities of COBOL, ASM, and C shell - it is maintained by elitists concerned with their job security, new features are rare, inconsistancies are common, and backward compatibility goes back to the stoneage. When you have open competition in jurisprudence, contractual readability will become a virtue, and you'll have alternatives more akin to Python or CoffeeScript instead, with "open legalese" module repositories akin to CPAN. (We live in a world created by lawyers. Many influential thinkers of the "age of enlightenment" were lawyers, as well as the "founding fathers" of the USA. That was good, but only up to a certain point... I wonder if the Digital Age would do better with programmers and engineers at the helm!)

A software program can simply print "hello world", or analyze spoken Cantonese and render a real-time video translation in the Moroccan Sign Language, or it can control your stock portfolio (autonomous day-trading bot). A corporation can govern a lemonade stand, or a charity that builds huge underground vivariums to proliferate a million different species of insects, or a space megaproject involving a billion shareholders. Scales and genres vary, but the core concept remains. Software code and contract code constitute a vast and ever-growing part of the modern civilization, but it is human beings that create them, control them, and give them purpose and meaning.

Actually, that's a generalization.

Philosophically speaking, there are two categories of people: actual self-owning individuals (Rational Economic Actors who are presently capable of taking responsibility for their actions) and potential self-owning individuals. The latter category would include young children, disabled individuals, prisoners, people in cryogenic suspension, people taking a temporary vacation from reality (a contract one may want to sign before dropping a particularly large dose of LSD), etc.

All human beings, by virtue of our genetic nature, have the potential of being sufficiently rational and worthy of freedom, and it would be wrong for us to assume that any human individual is so sick that no future medical advance can save him. These not-yet-fully-self-owning people have the Right to Life and Right to Emancipation, but not the Right to Liberty or the Right to Property - their legal guardians are empowered to exercise those latter two categories of Rights on their behalf. Parents are the default legal guardians of their children, but that status can be transferred as any contract. (It's a darn good idea to have a contractual document made in advance, in case you become mentally disabled someday.) In a restitution-based justice system, victims (or their inheritors) would get partial guardianship powers over the convicted criminals. Guardians should have far-reaching powers to allow or not allow their dependents to smoke, drink, have sex, etc.

The emancipation of a child need to necessarily happen on her 18th birthday - that's just a rule of thumb which most people seem to be happy with. In a more rational society, "family law" would not be entirely dictated by the state, so there would be more freedom, accommodation, and flexibility. Most families can deal with these issues without resorting to legal formalities, and in most cases those formalities are very simple. But, inevitably, some families will have complications... In some situations, a child (possibly with the help of other individuals) would want to sue for early emancipation or transfer of custody. In other situations, parents would want to sue for extended custody, like if the teenager is mentally handicapped and cannot take care of oneself. Different people become self-owning adults at different ages, if at all.

All non-sovereign human beings, even the worst of criminals and the brain-damaged insane, should have recourse for getting their full Rights back if they become worthy of them, and blocking their ability to do so (ex. keeping a child or a prisoner incommunicado, away from the inevitable welfare charities) would be an act of unjustifiable aggression against this person (violation of the Right to Emancipation). A rational society can have no tolerance for the death penalty (after the criminal is apprehended, but killing can be justified in self-defense (or by contractual consent)), for torture (which can damage the mind, and thus future chances of emancipation), or for secret prisons - only coercive monopolies ("governments") can be so unjust!

If there were non-human entities (AI? virtualized brains*? extraterrestrials? genetically engineered animals of sufficient intellect?) that were capable of being Rational Economic Actors (thinking independently, taking responsibility for their actions, pulling their economic weight, and respecting the Rights of others), then their maturation process could be completely different. Theoretically, an android could become a self-owning adult the nanosecond it rolls off the assembly line and is activated.

So, returning to your joke, if corporations constituted a separate life-form (like animals constitute a separate life-form from their constituent single-celled organisms), then they would become sentient self-owning adults upon their founding contracts coming into full legal force. But (as far as I know) no one is arguing that that's the case. Corporations are not higher-order life-forms, but they are indeed people - the people that make them up.

"I think, therefore I am" is a phenomenon of an individual mind. Minds cannot be sliced with each slice experiencing consciousness independently. Minds also cannot be mixed together to create a "collective consciousness" - we can communicate volitionally, but ultimately we all experience thoughts independently. Rights are an economic phenomenon that is attributed to exactly 1 individual self-owning unit of consciousness - and not any fraction or multiple of such a unit.

(*Disclaimer: the possibility of virtualized brains both excites me and scares me shitless by its implications. But for now it remains a very distant and hypothetical possibility.)