Regardless, the argument there isn't that you can't sue the government at all, but instead that the government is granted immunity for some subset of actions.
Going back to the original point, personhood is clearly not a requirement for being named in a suit. For more examples you can also see in rem cases, where the government sues property itself for civil forfeiture. 11 1/4 Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat's Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness did not need personhood to be named in a lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._11_1/4_Dozen_...
See the "Exceptions and abrogation" section of your own citation. It is indeed a (albeit large) subset of actions to which they can apply sovereign immunity.
Yes. All I'm trying to say is it's opt-in, not opt out. I don't find this particularly interesting or important so this is the last comment I'll make here.
Except it's not opt-in for a certain subset of actions of the government. For instance they can't block a discrimination suit on sovereign immunity grounds.
Civil forfeiture where govt sues "property" to seize it so they don't have to have a trial for the person owning said property is a shady dark pattern that shouldn't be cited as an ethical approach at all. Just my opinion.
‘Granted personhood’ doesn’t mean anything. The relevant legal term is ‘legal personality’. Governments certainly have legal personality. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be able to enter into contracts, file lawsuits, or... really make any claim to exist in any meaningful way.
Is the government itself granted first amendment protections as an association of citizens?
Or is it thought of a fundamentally different sort of entity, that yes can enter some sorts of legal arrangements, but isn't granted all the rights of a citizen?
The details of that probably haven't been settled by supreme court rulings, but the basic principle is that when a corporate entity says something, what's actually happening is that a person in the company is saying this thing, on the behalf of other people in that company, on behalf of, etc until you get to the shareholders. It's people all the way down, and people have rights. The same could be said of the government.
Note I'm a British Citizen, but the same basic legal principles apply over here, and have done for hundreds of years. I know there's a widely held conspiracy theory that this is all new, but jurists and legal scholars have been discussing and applying these principles for a very long time.
