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Opinion of the Court
when the lie goes only to belief of entitlement to redress.7 So far, then, as Congress assumed that the threat of a perjury conviction could deter an impoverished "person" from filing a frivolous or malicious lawsuit, it probably assumed that the person was an individual.
The fourth clue to congressional understanding is the failure of § 1915 even to hint at a resolution of the issues raised by applying an "inability to pay" standard to artificial entities. It is true, of course, that because artificial entities have no use for food or the other "necessities of life," Congress could not have intended the courts to apply the traditional "inability to pay" criterion to such entities. Yet no alternative standard can be discerned in the language of § 1915, and we can find no obvious analogy to the "necessities of life" in the organizational context. Although the most promising candidate might seem to be commercial-law "insolvency," commercial law actually knows a number of different insolvency concepts. See, e. g., 11 U. S. C. § 101(32) (1988 ed., Supp. III) (defining insolvency as used in the Federal Bankruptcy Code); Kreps v. Commissioner, 351 F. 2d 1, 9 (CA2 1965) (discussing a type of "equity" insolvency); Uniform Commercial Code § 1-201(23), 1 U. L. A. 65 (1989) (combining three different types of insolvency). In any event, since it is common knowledge that corporations can often perfectly well pay court costs and retain paid legal counsel in spite of being temporarily "insolvent" under any or all of these definitions, it is far from clear that corporate insolvency is appropriately analogous to individual indigency.8
7 We are not ignoring the fact that the individual who made the affidavit as the entity's agent could still be prosecuted for perjury. However, this is clearly a "second-best" solution; the law does not normally presume that corporate misbehavior can adequately be deterred solely by threatening to punish individual agents.
8 One plausible motive for Congress to include artificial entities within the meaning of "person" in § 1915 would be to aid organizations in bankruptcy proceedings. But the fact that the law has been settled for almost 20 years that § 1915(a) does not apply to bankruptcy proceedings, see
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