Virtual worlds and human flourishing

Another fascinating post at "Prawfsblawg":  Christine Hurt discusses a panel at the recent Law & Society conference on "virtual worlds."

I was fairly fascinated at how the panelists and audience spoke of virtual worlds.  What I saw as a product (the game) created and owned by a developer for use by patrons (gamers) others saw as a context for self-actualization, or what I would call "human flourishing."  Naturally then, if you believe that a virtual world is an arena for human flourishing, then you would want the humans involved (gamers) to have some rights and remedies so that their expectations would not be frustrated.  The gamers would need some property rights maybe, or free speech rights.  Panelists were loath to think of virtual worlds as merely regulated by contractual "terms of service."  Virtual worlds are a public space, more like a public university than a Chuck E Cheese or a bookstore.

OK, what is so fascinating about this to me?  Because I teach corporate law.  And for years (and years and years) progressive corporate law scholars have attempted to create a paradigm in which the corporation is seen as an arena for human flourishing of the participants in the corporation -- definitely for the employees, but maybe also for the customers, vendors, and the wider community.  Let's just say that this is not the prevailing view of the corporate form.  But if it were, then employees and other stakeholders would have a broader set of rights than they currently do.  Instead, other approaches prevail, such as the construct of the corporation as a "nexus of contracts," the very approach that the virtual world scholars seem to reject.

So, would the virtual world scholars be willing to adopt a broader view of corporate law than mere profit maximization?  Surely a bricks and mortar organization with human employees who rely on the corporation for their livelihood is as good a candidate for an arena of human flourishing than a series of computer code that is used by gamers unconnected by physical space or real names.

We invoke "human flourishing" a lot on this blog, and in the CST context more generally.  What do people think of Christine's post?  In particular, what do our corporate-law experts think?

Rick