On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, J Cullen wrote:
> If corporations were denied recognition as persons, they would be
> governed by statutes, as they were from the founding of the United
> States through this past year. Government still would not have the
> ability to abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press -- and one
> could argue that corporations, including non-profits, still would have
> the right to run programming such as the Hillary attack movie, since the
> First Amendment doesn't limit the freedom to persons.
What can have a right besides a legal person?
> But corporations claimed they should be protected from discrimination
> under the 14th Amendment
How can an entity have rights under the constitution -- like freedom of speech -- and not be covered by all rights in the constitution?
These are not gotcha questions at all. I've long wanted a serious legal analysis of this rights issue by someone who knows these things.
I see the appeal in not wanting corporations to have the same constitutional rights as individuals, and in the public's being able to abridge them in a way we can't (and don't want to be allowed to) with individuals. But I don't understand the logic whereby a corporation can be covered by some rights in the constitution (like free speech in the first amendment) and not by others (like discrimination in the 14th).
Perhaps one could get around this by creating another legal form of second-class personhood that applied to collective persons. But, besides the fact that that is would be very different from abolishing corporate personhood, I can't see how it's not liable to SA's objection that everything in this class -- all collective persons -- would have the same diminished rights.
One could then imagine creating a third class...
But at that point, again, SA's argument seems overwhelming: it seems to make much more sense, and to get much more root of the problem (which is the whole point here), to discuss instead the right you want to compromise and the grounds on which it is ok to do so. If we legislatively define that money is no longer a form of speech, that does seem to solve most the problem of the last decision. And when it comes to controlling property rights, there is a long legal tradition of being able to compromise it through regulation when such property is "clothed in a public interest." And that seems a place where one doesn't actually want to discriminate between property owned by natural persons and that owned by corporate ones.
Michael