With such a constitutional amendment, New York Times v. Sullivan would be decided differently. In other words, newspapers owned by corporations would be far less free to criticise public figures, including government officials, because of the danger of being sued for libel and having to prove the truth of all their allegations.
On the other hand, it would do nothing to control the powers of rich individuals, including their ability to fund PACs – they just have to leave the PAC unincorporated.
Yeah, I only own three corporations outright and play the stock market, so naturally I don’t know anything about it. And I do explicitly own the corporations to front for me in my business interests so that I can keep myself out of sight.
And I confess to being equally exhausted by people who can’t think outside the box to address a problem.
And corporate personhood, in today’s world, is a massive and growing problem. And, yes. Corporations are supposed to be our creatures. They are supposed to exist to facilitate our ability to do business.
But in the modern era where the largest corporations are larger than all but the very largest governments, we are losing our ability to control them. When the amounts of money they control are so enormous that any government can be bought, we can’t control them so long as we allow them an equal footing with us before the law.
Instead, what we are doing is giving absolute control of our lives and future to the people who control the corporations. While this may in principle be the shareholders, it is in fact the senior officers of the corporations.
It is time to make a change, a massive change.
And if you’re too weary, I suggest you take a nap. Maybe the change will happen while you are asleep.
Two conditions
So get back to me when I’m dictator, alright?
Why would this change anything in that regard? First Amendment attaches to individuals - including the individual who writes the story. Absent malice, no problem.
No, it wouldn’t control wealthy individuals. But it would make it impossible for them to hide their actions.
OK. I can go with that. We start the whole thing with a prefatory statement: "Effective exactly five years after this amendment is ratified, … "
But in NYT v. Sullivan, it wasn’t the journalist that was sued: it was the corporation that owned and published the newspaper. You can only gt around that by having newspapers (and magazines, and radio and TV stations) owned by individuals, not by corporations.
I submit the OP is talking about destroying the U.S. in order to save it.
I also tire of these discussions because they don’t see the problem right in the language of the First Amendment. The amendment does not say “persons have the right to free speech.” It says “Congress shall make no law.” It doesn’t matter if the law restricts natural persons, corporate persons, or extraterrestrial persons. It’s a restriction on what Congress can do, and the OP’s proposal wouldn’t change it one whit.
I wonder if the OP is aware that the ACLU, the NAACP, the Democratic Party, the City of New York, the Humane Society, and the church of his choice are all “corporations”, and as such would no longer have any freedom of speech, religion, the press, right to due process of law, right of privacy, protection against self-incrimination, right to trial by jury, freedom from excessive fines, and so on?
No law should ever have a religious exemption.
Would this even work? I admit I know nothing about corporations, but it seems to me that a corporation could just use the civil rights of the individuals that make it up to get around any lack of personhood. Maybe Microsoft can no longer have freedom of speech, but Bill Gates still does. If an excessive fine were to be levied against the company, it would also have to be levied towards the individual. In order for the company to self incriminate, the individuals speaking would also have to self-incriminate. And so on.
It seems to my admittedly uninformed opinion that there would just have to be some rearranging and everything could go on exactly as before, as long as the basic concepts of a corporation are kept (like limited liability). Nothing is fixed, nothing is broken.
[quote=“Polycarp, post:14, topic:618626”]
There is also the idea that the ‘personhood’ of corporations, established to minimize investment risk and allow contracting and lawsuit capabilities, was in law for a couple centuries before someone decided to regard a corporation as a person for all purposes…/QUOTE]
No one has done this.
If the problem is campaign contributions to politicians, then wouldn’t a better constitutional solution be an amendment stating that Congress has the power to limit campaign contributions, regardless of the First Amendment?
I think we need to put an explanation of the whole “corporate personhood” thing in the registration agreement for this MB. Fewer concepts are more misunderstood. Oh, and we can add an explanation about the difference between the limit powers of the federal government and the plenary powers of the states, too. 
If we completely eliminated all forms of corporate personhood, we’d have to invent a new concept for the non-Citizens United forms that have been in existence for hundreds of years and form some of the most important foundations of a modern economy.
No journalists were involved in Sullivan. The NYT was being sued because it published an advertisement created by a third party (the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South). Sullivan sued members of the committee (including Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy) as well as the Times.
How would you square this with the First Amendment’s right peaceably to assemble, including, it must be conceded, those assemblies solidified by way of various corporate forms permitted under the law?
Damn that First Amendment! Forever prohibiting us from outlawing the opposition! What we need is a one-party state (once we’ve banned counterrevolutionary organizations) that can effectuate the dictatorship of the proletariat unimpeded!
I think it might be stretching things a bit to say that the right to peaceably assemble protects the rights of intangible legal constructs. That isn’t to say that I don’t think the Constitution presupposes the existence of corporations, just that they aren’t “assemblies”.
It certainly protects individually each of those members. Corporations are not just conjured into existence, they represent the joint enterprise of their members. The right to assemble is meaning if the assemblers are forbidden from acting as a cohesive whole. Notice also that the OP would restrict the rights of even partnerships, which come into being legally whenever two or more people agree to undertake a lasting joint enterprise (whether for profit or otherwise).
What do you think is the sine qua non that corporations lack that make them something other than assemblages of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights (among other things)?
I disagree that this is necessarily what’s being aimed at. Corporations of all types are liability shields. It is often argued that such a shield is necessary in order for these kinds of organizations to function. The creation of such an entity is not necessarily the same thing as what you propose. I don’t truly know what the OP is concerned with, but this problem—if it is a problem—has bothered me for a long time. Corporations are individuals—there is a bottom to them, when people look for redress. But there is no bottom for the benefits: they flow past the individual lines all the way back. Only bad contracts and individuals can get away with such nonsense in the long term.
There is no reason to suppose that people can’t get together to agree to do something without the law backing their play (modulo contracts which the civil laws would see as binding). But I can’t sue a contract, I sue individuals or parties. Instead, law reifies the contract and the corporation becomes an entity for cost purposes, but remains a fluid, many-faced entity for benefit purposes. That is, specifically, in my opinion, all corporations are inherently externality machines, pumping out costs while laundering and sinking benefits. This aspect is specifically and identically tied to the notion of corporate personhood. Without it, you can see how far the rabbit hole goes.
If we are to enter a debate on these points, please let me state that I have been in several real-life arguments about this aspect and have always concluded that there is no practical alternative whatsoever. Nothing. I can and do live with that. I just don’t like it.
A couple things, which perhaps you already know, but that occur to me.
First, as far as a shield from liability, that is correct. But there are important caveats. For contract liability, the liability is unlimited only if the counterparty knew or should have known that it was dealing with a corporation (say by including “Inc.” or “Ltd.” in the corporation’s name when papering the deal). That is, the counterparty knows in advance of this potential limitation of sources of redress.
Now, this counterparty might only be able to deal with corporations (and I think this is a large part of the resentment directed to corporations, they’re the only game in town). To that, I say tough. I don’t think the law should distort markets such that if a business is prepared to offer a product only with the availability of the corporate shield, the law will endeavor to frustrate that. (And the outcome would be, of course, not the provision of the product by unlimited liability entities, but the withdrawal of the product, which people do wish to buy, from the market altogether.)
Secondly, a sham corporation that exists only to attempt to shield the nefarious acts of its managers or owners can have their limited liability set aside (piercing the corporate veil) and personal liability imposed on the responsible natural persons. This is what would occur if a manager or owner used the corporation to commit an intentional tort.
As for negligence, liability is generally limited.
As for the limited downside and unlimited upside, this holds for natural persons as well. A negligent uninsured, judgment-proof motorist is only going to have to pay the amount he has. You can’t get blood from a stone after all. So it seems strange to count this as a unique and perverse privilege afforded only to corporations.