What I hear isn’t that corporations are exactly the same as people so much as corporations are continually testing the limits on their person-hood and supposedly conservative judges keep finding in favor of increased person-hood rights for corporations. So, the fear isn’t that it’s already happened, just that is seems to be happening.
Possession of a controlled substance is an offence under the Controlled Substances Act 1970, unless one has dispensation from the Attorney General. Corporate personhood doesn’t obviate individual liability in every instance.
Which wasn’t what BCRA §203 was doing. It was penalising disbursements for electioneering communications by labor and corporations.
Neither did Cecil. Here’s what he wrote:
Wiki provides the basis for considering corporations individual persons rather than associations of people.
Relevant:
Your exact words were: “The government may not censor speech, regardless of the source”. This implies that the government can never censor speech, which is incorrect.
And source is relevant. If we’re going to say that freedom of speech automatically applies to everything, not just humans, then it would bring up absurd questions like whether I am allowed to turn off my radio when a political speech is coming out of it.
…actually, that last example doesn’t quite work does it?
Substitute for a computer generating random strings.
Oops, I missed that. Thanks.
Wow.
Never mind, Cecil - please don’t publish a column on this, because your last column was highly slanted toward the “omigod corporations have been declared people” nonsense. From the article:
“What most people don’t know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk.”
Whoa. False - and impossible, of course!
"even now lawyers argue that an attempt to sue a corporation for lying is an unconstitutional infringement on its First Amendment right to free speech. (This year, for example, we saw Nike v. Kasky.) "
Arguing something is just arguing something. Only if the courts accept the argument does it become reality.
And, in this case, the court (in this case, the California Supreme court) REJECTED the argument. (The case was settled out of court before it could go to further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.) So there you go.
“fact is, the courts have been chipping away at corporate personhood for years”
Well, there you go. Clearly they don’t have all the same rights as people.
“But it’d be nice to have a clear-cut ruling, say, that limiting campaign contributions by big businesses doesn’t mean you’re restricting their First Amendment rights.”
That ruling was made long ago - and still stands! Citizens United didn’t change any laws or rules related to donations to campaigns or candidates, which are still banned entirely from corporate treasuries.
(Nor did Citizens United apply only to corporations, since it had nothing whatsoever to do with corporate personhood, but whatever).
It’s interesting that the question Cecil was responding to was also correcting him.
“Corporations have been declared people,” on its face, is just as much a loony legal theory as the one he was bashing in his latest column. I remember some people tried to lampoon the CU decision by trying to get a corporation on a ballot to run for office. They were denied, of course. This simply proved the point - that they were wrong about the law. The joke was on them.
No, the question would be if the government could make a law forcing you to turn off your radio when political speech was coming out if it.
You bring up a great example.
Obviously the source of the speech is not the radio, it’s the person speaking in the radio station - who is a person.
Also obvious is that for the government to claim that it had the power to force people to turn off their radios, or ban the sale or possession of radios, simply because it didn’t like the speech coming from it would be blatantly unconstitutional. And courts have held that such ridiculous attempts to suppress speech are unconstitutional.
Thanks for proving my point beautifully.
But it’s the corporation that possesses it, and it’s a person! Right?
See how loony this theory gets when tested against reality? That’s the point.
Which is unconstitutional. Spending money on speech is a right of speech. See Buckley v. Valeo.
That’s not all he wrote though.
Wiki provides the basis for considering corporations individual persons rather than associations of people.
Relevant:
[/QUOTE]
Right…because corporations aren’t people in every sense.
Lance Strongarm - Loony tax protester theories?
Learn about Tom Cryer, a lawyer who tried to prove wrong his loony tax protester friend. After two years of investigation, all he got from the IRS was threats and intimidation. He told the the IRS to either “show me the law” or he would stop overpaying his taxes (we sign our believed tax amount under penalty of perjury, remember?).
He was tried for willful failure to file. “Willful failure to file” is a thought crime, ie We, the IRS, and a jury will agree that you really think otherwise. With Tom Cryer, the jury believed him.
You might want to hold on the thanks for a minute.
Because of course I realized myself the radio example doesn’t work which is why I said as much and changed it to be a computer generating text. The text that such a machine produces is not currently considered constitutionally protected speech.
This runs counter to your point.
But it DOES! It works PERFECTLY!
Really? Got proof for that assertion?
I don’t think it’s been tested in court, but I say you’d be wrong about that too.
Well if it’s not been tested in court then there is no precedence and at best we can say “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be protected”.
But sure, I’ll take the opposite side to you: I think a government employee can switch off their computer that is generating random strings without fear of being sued.
Oops, precedent.
I think corporations are people. And they owe a lot of back taxes.
Uh, but that’s not an example of what’s at stake.
Can the government ban shut down YOUR computer that is generating something (and not just random strings, we’re talking about speech here)?
Suppose you programmed a computer to generate speech about politics. Could the government ban it, based on nothing but its content (there are no viruses in it, etc) and say that it can do so because your computer isn’t human?
And while we’re at it, could the government ban the sale of all computers used for speech, like we’re doing now, based on the theory that money isn’t speech, or computers aren’t speech, or computers don’t have rights? Would any of those be acceptable to you?
Yes it is. You have claimed that anything and everything is protected by the right to free speech, whether human or not.
This overly broad statement has all sorts of weird implications — such as that the government itself should not be able to shut down their own computer if it was generating random text strings.
OTOH it’s a straw man to talk about whether the government can shut down your computer because the government is not entitled to do anything with my possessions unless I’m suspected of committing some crime, or I need to pay taxes or whatever. That’s whether it’s generating speech or not.
I worked in this area of law for years. There’s nothing unusual or remarkable about corporate personhood. It’s simple and clear, once you understand the background concepts. And those background concepts have nothing to do with the 14th amendment.
To simplify a complex history: Corporations were invented as vehicles through which investors could pool their money. The invention of corporations was a kind of leap forward in legal technology. Before corporations were available, a business with multiple owners was a partnership in which all partners had management authority over the business, and all partners were personally liable for the debts of the business. The main point of corporation laws was to assure passive investors that they could never lose more than the amount of their investment.
A corporation is simply a way for a group of people to jointly own property and enter into contracts. Corporate personhood expresses the relationship between the owners, the managers, the corporate property, and the people who do business with the corporation.
Example: Suppose that Bob and Fred are plumbers. They decide to go into business together, so they form BF Plumbing, Inc. Bob and Fred combine their property to form the business. Bob contributes some tools and a truck, while Fred contributes some land. They borrow money from First National Bank with no personal guarantees.
Corporate personhood makes it clear that neither Bob nor Fred now own the tools, truck, or land. That property is now owned by a new person called BF Plumbing, Inc. And if BF Plumbing, Inc. doesn’t pay back its loan, then the bank can’t collect from Bob or Fred. The bank can only collect from this imaginary person called BF Plumbing, Inc., because that’s who it signed the contract with.
Now suppose that Fred is driving the truck to a plumbing job, and he runs a stop sign and injures a little old lady. She can sue the corporation, because she was injured by corporate property operated by a corporate representative. She can also sue Fred, because he was the actual flesh-and-blood person driving the truck. But she can’t sue Bob, because he didn’t own the truck. He used to own the truck, but then he gave it to the corporation.
Those are the sorts of scenarios that corporate personhood is designed to address. The questions that arise from these scenarios aren’t particularly interesting to non-lawyers, but they do require clear and reliable answers. That’s why personhood is part of the bedrock of the very concept of a corporation. Without personhood, lots of basic business questions would not have clear answers.
Once you understand this background, the 14th amendment questions are easy. A corporation has free speech, equal protection, and so forth because it’s simply a collection of people. If Bob can speak and Fred can speak, then the combination of Bob and Fred should also be able to speak. There’s no reason to take away people’s rights simply because they’ve decided to pool their money and appoint a spokesman.
Exactly. All the laws and rights that apply to people carry over to corporations because they are simply collections of people.
So if Bob or Fred can get married, own a passport or run for president, so their corporation should be able to.
No – only some rights that belong to real people also belong to corporations. So, corporations can own property, have employees, go bankrupt, and carry on political campaigns. However, they cannot “get married, own a passport or run for president” – they are not treated the same as real people.
Absolutely – that’s what I was actually illustrating. Some people upthread were implying that if a person is legally allowed to do something it is entailed that corporations must also be allowed. That’s not the case.