My friend Lyman Johnson seems to think so:
Justice Alito, for the Court, rejected the view that business corporations must (and do) singularly act to make money, even as he acknowledged making profits to be “a” (not “the” or “sole”) objective and one that is “central.” A few gems here: “[M]odern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else and many do not do so.” “[I]t is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives.” “Not all corporations that decline to organize as nonprofits do so in order to maximize profits. For example, organizations with religious and charitable aims might organize as for-profit corporations…” Alito then notes that “the objectives that may properly be pursued by the companies in these cases are governed by the laws of the states in which they are incorporated…” Given the breadth of objectives that can be pursued under state corporate law, it was easy for the Court to conclude that corporate liberty extended to “the pursuit of profit in conformity with the owners’ religious principles.” This liberating principle was pointedly germane to the Hobby Lobby case itself, as Alito cited to the record wherein the owners of that corporation calculated they lose millions of dollars annually by closing on Sundays - precisely because of religious beliefs. Doing so, that is, sacrificing profits, the Court ruled, is permitted and altogether proper under corporate law. Too bad former Chancellor William Chandler did not have the benefit of Alito’s recent primer when Chandler wrote the deeply-flawed eBay v. Craigslist decision in 2010.
To hold that close corporations were “free” from the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act, because of RFRA, the Court thus had to determine that, under state corporate law, such companies are likewise “free” from some imagined state legal mandate to maximize profits. Readily concluding that corporations clearly do have the liberty not to maximize profits, the Court concluded that, as a legal matter, they were necessarily “free” to exercise religion. But critically, that means business corporations, being free in this respect under state corporate law, can pursue a whole host of objectives other than making money. Those objectives include various humanitarian, social, and environmental objectives of the sort progressives have long championed. As one who for decades has favored a vision of corporations (and corporate law) as being utterly conducive to serving broad social purposes - as freely determined, of course, by the appropriate corporate decisionmakers - and as one who supported Hobby Lobby, I found it odd to see these companies opposed by so many corporate progressives.
As for Lyman's last point, the purportedly reality based community's over the top reaction to Hobby Lobby is partly a tribal thing (secularists versus people of faith) but it's also because they recognize the potential for Hobby Lobby to become a problem for them in many other spheres of the culture war.
Turning to Lyman's main point, I think it's critical to remember that Hobby Lobby is very explicitly a case about closely held corporations.
“As a leading commentator in the field has observed: ‘unlike the typical shareholder in the publicly held corporation, who may be simply an investor or a speculator and cares nothing for the responsibilities of management, the shareholder in a close corporation is a co-owner of the business and wants the privileges and powers that go with ownership. …’” Simms v. Exeter Architectural Products, Inc., 868 F.Supp. 677, 682 n. 1 (M.D.Pa.1994) (citing (O'Neal, Close Corporations [2d Ed.], § 1.07, at pp. 21–22 [n. omitted]).
I also refer you to Baran v. Baran, 1947 WL 2915, which held of close corporations that "It is not in violation of any rule or principle of law for stockholders, who own a majority of the stock in a corporation, to cause its affairs to be managed in such way as they may think best calculated to further the ends of the corporation, and for this purpose to appoint one or more proxies, who shall vote in such a way as will carry out their plans." In that case, the court upheld an agreement among the shareholders to elect one another to corporate office. But why should the same rule not apply to a consensus among shareholders of a close corporation to define the ends of the corporation in religious terms?
Hobby Lobby's meaning will be contested on many levels for a long time to come, but I think it is best understood as recognizing the well-established principle that shareholders of a closely held corporation can alter the default rules of corporate law, including the issue of corporate purpose. I don't think Hobby Lobby should be understood as changing the default rule, especially by why of what is arguably dicta.
