The Corporation is a Legal Person. Get Over It.

In a Slate column prompted by Citizens United v. FEC, entitled The Pinocchio Project: Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy, Dahlia Lithwick complains that the Supreme Court struck "down century-old restrictions on corporate spending in federal elections." She then cites approvingly to Justice Steven's wheezing complaints:

Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations "are not human beings" and "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." He insists that "they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Of course, as we saw in my earlier post Citizens United v FEC: The First Amendment Rights of Corporate "Persons", the proposition that the corporation is a legal person with (most of) the same rights as natural persons has been settled as a matter of constitutional law since at least 1885 and, as a matter of common law, for centuries before that.

Comments

[Allan]

I would suggest that in 1783 they did not consider corporations people. So, under the originalist meaning of the Constitution theory...

On the other hand, perhaps they did not consider humans people either, given that the early Congress really did not respect the first amendment (see, e.g., Alien and Sedition Act).

I really have no problem with the corporation having rights. But I think that the rights, like the corporation itself, should be granted by the state and not imbued in the Constitution.

I do recognize that this has been around for 130 years, but longevity does not make it right. Roe v. Wade has been around for 40 years, but it it is just as bad a decision now as it was then (and I am definitively pro-choice).

[Martin Nyberg]

Something being law for over 100 years doesn't mean it's right or beneficial. Corporations have all the rights of human beings and none of the responsibilities. Corporations commit crimes every year and if they are convicted they are fined and let off... even for murder, theft, and extortion, for which a Human Being would have his life ended - either with the death penalty, or by years of imprisonment. This is unequal and not justice. Do you know how corporate personhood was put into law? Illegally -

The paragraph below is from this article by Mark Green - http://tinyurl.com/ydr7pz3.

"In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., involving a routine local tax matter, the court reporter incorrectly put as the formal "headquote" of the decision something that was never argued or decided, namely that "the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations." As Thom Hartmann describes well in his book Unequal Justice, this "decision" then became to be regarded as black-letter law, meaning that, in Justice William O. Douglas's later lament, "corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives." "

So we will NOT get over it. We will fight it until it's changed I hope you will join us.

[Chris MacDonald]

I agree that corporations are, and should be, seen as legal persons.

But it seems to me crucially important to recognize that "personhood" is not a monolithic concept. Those who find the notion of corporate personhood repugnant seem sometimes to think that if we call a corporation a person, we mean that it has every right that natural persons have. In fact, to recognize corporations as persons is merely to *start* a conversation on what sorts of rights we're going to recognizes them as having.

I tried to sort some of this through on my blog a couple of months ago:
http://www.businessethics.ca/blog/2009/09/why-corporations-must-be-legal-persons.html