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Corporations Cannot Have Natural Rights… Duh

29 points by jackowayed 17y ago

zzzmarcus 17y ago
"Without government, people have certain rights. They choose to surrender some of them to the government." What "natural" rights do you have without government?
- ramidarigaz 17y ago
  The right to kill, the right take without giving, the right to go where you want, when you want. Pretty much all the stuff that is considered to be bad today. Those are rights that the government has taken away, probably for the better ('cept for the last one. I hate fences).
Shamiq 17y ago
I want to hear what Eliezer has to say.
jfoutz 17y ago
We (the U.S.) protect rich people's freedom of speech. We protect organization's freedom of speech. Saying corporations have no freedom of speech is like saying peaceable assembly is a separate right from freedom of speech. It's not. The first amendment gets value from thousands, or millions of people getting together to say the same thing at the same time.
- benpbenp 17y ago
  Yes. While I understand the point of view of the article, I can also see a corporation just as a group of persons acting in concert. Each one of these persons has natural rights, so why can't they exercise these rights in concert?
  - Dryw 17y ago
    Employees of the corporation may have different political views. When a corporation donates money to a political cause, it is not expressing the views of all of its employees.
  - jackowayed 17y ago
    Because corporations aren't people. You can't arrest a corporation and send it to jail. You can't draft a corporation into the military (though drafting some of those defense contractors and paying their workers military salaries would sure help with the deficit). Corporations have separate rights and responsibilities from the people that own them.
    - bokonist 17y ago
      But corporations do not speak, people do. The management are all people, and the owners are all people. These people can and have been drafted into the military or arrested for illegal conduct. Congress can make no law abridging any person's freedom of speech, period.
      - jackowayed 17y ago
        There's no law keeping them from speaking just like any other person. There's (well, there was) a law keeping them from using millions of corporate dollars to broadcast that speech.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      given that, why would unions have more rights than corporations?
    - mseebach 17y ago
      > You can't arrest a corporation and send it to jail No, but you can sue it and rule against it. Ever seen a ruling with a name like "Smith vs. Acme Inc."? > Because corporations aren't people. No, and corporations also can't speak. So free speech for corporations is an oxymoron if you don't mean free speech by the people that make up a corporation.
- sethg 17y ago
  Before the Citizens United case came down, thousands or millions of people were free to get together to say the same thing at the same time by donating money to organizations (“527 corporations”) whose specific purpose was political advocacy. (Or they could give money directly to their favorite political parties or candidates, but then each person involved faced limits on what he or she could contribute.) What wasn’t legal was for another kind of corporation to use its general-treasury funds for the same purpose. The laws banning that kind of spending were based on the idea that when a for-profit corporation injects itself into the electoral process¹, it creates the appearance of political corruption if not actual corruption. After all, if the corporate directors authorizing the donation didn’t expect to get some kind of benefit from the politician in return, then they were wasting their stockholders’ money. The majority in Citizens United acknowledged that preventing the appearance of corruption was a legitimate concern (which is why restrictions on direct donations to political parties and candidates were allowed to stand), but was so committed to the “treat corporations as people” principle that they didn’t see the point of restricting contributions from corporations. ¹I.e., corporations could run ads saying “nuclear energy is great”, but not “vote for Smith, because he supports nuclear energy”.
  - ShabbyDoo 17y ago
    "After all, if the corporate directors authorizing the donation didn’t expect to get some kind of benefit from the politician in return" Of course. But, that thing in return might not be corrupt. Let's say you are a gun manufacturer and you give money to politicians who support the NRA. Corrupt? No more so than a gun owner making contributions for similar reasons. Beneficial? You bet.
  - hga 17y ago
    I'm pretty sure you're essentially incorrect, in that one of the things Citizens United struck down was the ban on "vote for Smith" by any non-media corporation in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general). Wasn't it a specific ban from that provision in McCain-Feingold on their anti-Hillary movie that prompted them to file the lawsuit? I wasn't able to quickly determine if Citizens United itself is a 527, but they are affiliated with one (http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes2.php?ein=&cycle=2008&tname=Citizens+United http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes2.php?ein=&cycle...).
yardie 17y ago
Freedom of speech isn't a right, in human history, it's an anomaly. We've elevated it's status to a right to make sure their is no dispute of its importance. These things are only held together by the blood and sweat of the people that are willing to protect them. Corporations have neither of these qualities so I fail to understand how they qualify for something that most people can't even get for themselves.
- joubert 17y ago
  Freedom of speech is necessary for an effective democracy. Corporations are not citizens.
mquander 17y ago
This doesn't seem to me to have any merit, either legally or from common sense. Corporations have no rights under the Constitution? Oh, so can the FBI raid the offices of any corporation without a warrant? Could Congress pass a law prohibiting CNN from covering a war? Obviously, the Constitution should prohibit these things, and it does. The reason the court did not elaborate on its classification of corporations as "speakers" in the context of the First Amendment is that it's settled law, with a long history you could look up on Wikipedia, and none of the justices (even the dissenting ones) disagree with that classification. The dissent of the minority was based on the idea that even though corporations should enjoy a strong right to free political speech, the state's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption is great enough that it should be restricted in this case. Addendum: No, I don't think this is a really good situation, although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates. However, I think that it's just a consequence of two root problems -- the first being the great inequality of wealth (and therefore power) in our society, being nearly all concentrated in a rich elite; the second being the lack of serious and/or compulsory public financing for campaigns, so that wealth is usually a prerequisite to being elected.
- joubert 17y ago
  Corporations are not citizens. This means that technically they cannot cast a vote in an election. But it also means that in practice the power they can exert to effect certain political outcomes must be constrained (otherwise votes of citizens will become even more meaningless because of the asymmetry of capital concentration). You say "although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates". Surely they were not actually able to push unlimited amounts of money to influence political outcomes, otherwise there would have been no reason for the Supreme Court to make the change. Or no?
  - mquander 17y ago
    Well, what I meant specifically is that corporations can influence elections indirectly via PACs and 527s, and that corporations can attempt to influence elected candidates via lobbying (and by actually getting their representatives into positions of power) so they already have some reasonably effective mechanisms for converting their money to votes. I don't think that the Supreme Court decision to enable them to spend directly on candidates really took into account very much these existing abilities one way or the other, although I'm not a lawyer and I probably haven't studied it much more than you, so maybe I'm missing some chain of reasoning.
anon-e-moose 17y ago
It's interesting to me how everyone who disagrees with this ruling keep acting like the justices are extremely confused and decided through some convoluted mental process that corporations are pretend-people. Lets look at the First Amendment, shall we? "Congress shall make no law"..."abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" Hmm... doesn't say you have to be a person. In fact it seems to just say, Congress can't make a law... abridging speech. Not speech by people, or speech by companies, or speech by the media. Just speech. As in, anyone can say whatever. Especially about politics. Justice Kennedy brilliantly points out: '"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." He also noted that since there was no way to distinguish between media and other corporations, these restrictions would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television and blogs.' (via Wikipedia) Honestly I'm not sure what's going to change... rich people and unions already dump money into politics, through various means.
cmars232 17y ago
I think the proposed heavy tax on corporate contributions makes a nicer distinction between speech with words and "speech" with money.
wycats 17y ago
Corporations aren't normal associations of people or the arguments below would be correct. They're groups of people hired by others to spend their money WITH A SPECIAL LIABILITY SHIELD. That shield protects them personally from the corporations responsibility and prevents the human rights from leaking into the artificial, government-created entity that is a corporation. The individual people involved, acting by themselves or as a group, are free to speak as much as they want, spending as much money as they want in the process. What they're not, I argue, is free to spend someone else's money through an artificial construct that shields them from all responsibility for their actions. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. If the human responsibilities assoiated with a han right are shielded, the human right is shielded too.
- _delirium 17y ago
  Are you arguing that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations at all then? So was the Pentagon Papers case, which ruled that the New York Times Company had a First-Amendment right to publish the Pentagon Papers free from government censorship, wrong? Maybe some individual author had the right to publish them, but the New York Times Company didn't? What about the free-speech precedents involving corporations like adult-film producers?
  - Mets102 17y ago
    The New York Times didn't exercise free speech rights in publishing the Pentagon Papers. The First Amendment protects five specific rights (speech, press, religion, assembly, petition), along with protecting against an establishment of religion. The Times was using its press rights under the First Amendment. There are different lines of jurisprudence in First Amendment law depending upon the right implicated. A press case is going to be decided upon a different line of cases than a free speech case. The corporate or non-corporate form is irrelevant. It's looking to the substance. There's a difference between freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Freedom of the press protects the ability to report the news. It's rooted in the the British government prosecuting those publishing stories critical of the government as seditious libel, giving rise to the maxim, "the greater the truth, the greater the libel." Speech, in contrast, is the speaking of opinion. The Times did not do this in publishing the Pentagon Papers. There is a difference between a newspaper with corporate form publishing the news and a corporation such as ExxonMobil or Google effectively advocating for a specific candidate.
gfunk911 17y ago
The merits of this decision are a legitimete topic for debate. I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about it. The point that I feel like those who are against it completely miss (and that anti-business people generally miss) is that corporations are just groups of people. It's people/turtles all the way down. A quote that I found interesting, even though I do not agree 100%: "Until today, we had the right to free speech, and the right to assembly, but not the right to free speech when we were assembled. The Supreme Court has thankfully corrected that absurdity." http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/01/good-news-for-free-speech.html http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/01/good-news-for-...
- joubert 17y ago
  There is a huge power asymmetry between a corporation and a natural person. If the former is able to voice their political opinion without constraint (e.g. Enron spends, say $1 billion dollars in an election), they can effectively manipulate our democracy, drowning out citizens' political will. This is what just happened when the (conservative) Supreme Court overturned the limits on corporate spending in political campaigns. Moreover, it now enables foreign corporations to manipulate election outcomes.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Lets be clear what we mean by "manipulate" and "drowning out citizens' political will": the corporation may use speech to persuade voters to vote a certain way. So it isn't so much "drowning out" citizen's political will as persuading them to exercise it in a certain way.
    - joubert 17y ago
      If an organization is able to purchase all the advertising space in a jurisdiction, they can effectively decide how people will vote. Consider the Prop 8 smear campaign in California by the Mormon Church.
      - yummyfajitas 17y ago
lmkg 17y ago
While I generally agree with the article and disagree with the SCOTUS ruling, I do have to take exception to this statement: > However, corporations do not exist outside of government If you take the "corporations are most certainly not people" position (and I do), then a corporation is an agreement between a group of people with a mutual economic interest. That's not a government creation, that's a naturally arising phenomenon. You don't need any sort of government to create a corporation, although contract law would help. But I don't think it's possible to have contracts without corporations arising naturally and organically. Am I missing something? Obviously, the US has passed a lot of laws giving corporations particular rights, responsibilities, liabilities, privileges, etc. But that doesn't mean that corporations are government creations, in the same way that citizen's rights are natural right that are recognized rather than granted.
- wycats 17y ago
  You're thinking about partnerships, which are the associations of people others are talking about (created, as you point out, via contract law). Corporation are special entities created by governments to shield the executives from persoanl responsibility for their actions as executives. In THAT capacity, I argue that the corporation does not inherit human rights because of the shield that protects the underlying individuals for responsibility for their actions.
- joubert 17y ago
  A corporation is established in terms of a Companies Act or the like in terms of Corporate Law (particulars depend on the jurisdiction). A corporation is a legal person, but not a natural person. A corporation is not an agreement between a group of people. People can agree to form a corporation, but the corporation itself is not an agreement (merely the end result). For example, a corporation can act against the interests of the people who founded it.
techiferous 17y ago
What I find ironic is that we experience a fair amount of cognitive disequilibrium when we discuss the legal rights of corporations in comparison with the legal rights of individuals, but we aren't bothered by the difference between the legal rights of humans and the legal rights of animals. IMO, the basic rights of human individuals are more similar to the rights of advanced animals (like pigs) than they are to the rights of corporations.
- nhebb 17y ago
  Because no one wants to get sued by their breakfast sausage.
grellas 17y ago
Were corporations not accorded protections under the Bill of Rights (as argued in this piece on the theory that "state-created entities" are artificial and were not intended to be covered by such protections), among other things: 1. The government could conduct searches and seizures at will of corporate property in disregard of the Fourth Amendment. 2. It could take corporate property without compensation in disregard of the Fifth. 3. It could deny the rights of free speech to the New York Times and other corporate entities in disregard of the First. 4. It could deny the right of religious expression to churches, synagogues and other religious organizations that are incorporated. Nor, if the logic of this piece were to be followed that "state-created entities" should not be protected under the Bill of Rights, would any other legally-recognized entity be entitled to such protections. How about: 1. Universities. 2. Schools. 3. Charities. 4. Partnerships, LLCs, trusts, and other business entities (want the government to confiscate the IP or other assets of your startup and say it owes you nothing because it is not you but a mere "state-created entity" from which it is taking the property?). This list could go on and on at great length. The analysis in this piece may be something that one may want to advocate as some sort of ideal but, in terms of law, history, etc., it is quite flawed. I think this is more a talking point in the recent uproar over the Citizens United case than it is a serious point of constitutional discussion.
- wycats 17y ago
  Let's actually take a look at the two scenarios. In the case of corporation-owned property, the shareholders indirectly own the property itself. If the government takes away the property, the shareholders lose the property, and the government violates the takings clause insofar as individual humans have lost money. In the case of corporate speech, the shareholders are not speaking at all. Instead, executives are speaking, protected from the consequences of their speech by the corporate shield. In comparison with the above case, nothing stops the individual executives or the individual shareholders from speaking, either by themselves or in concert with others. What I'm suggesting is that the form of the corporation, which the government created to shield actors from the consequences of their actions, is not itself afforded the right to speech.
  - 17y ago
jhancock 17y ago
I have been thinking of another aspect of this case. One that obviates net neutrality, IMO. The ruling against McCain-Feingold states that government does not have the power to create penalties (criminal or civil) that limit speech. In the case of McCain-Feingold, the court ruled that it was enough to base its ruling simply on the assumption that the law "may" limit speech, without proof that it actually has. I think this is reasonable. Here is where it unravels: There are other laws the government has passed that provide penalties as McCain-Feingold does. A key example is broadcast spectrum sales. The FCC has sold rights of public spectrum and provides criminal penalties for infringing on the use of that spectrum. This of course creates third party arbiters of content and has provably limited speech. Case in point: next week's SuperBowl will show an ad against abortion but has refused an ad for a gay dating site. Political ads are refused all the time by major broadcasters when they do not suit the content arbiters. I think the duplicity of the court lies in the cases they refuse to hear that should apply the same logic as this ruling. Does anyone know of examples of such cases that have been refused or ruled against?
- hga 17y ago
  I think you misunderstand what was struck down in McCain-Feingold: an explicit ban on non-media corporate speech advocating the election or defeat of a candidate in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general).
  - jhancock 17y ago
    What was struck down was Congress passing a law that restricts speech and the rational as published by the court clearly shows this is why the law was struck down. McCain-Feingold does restrict speech and does so in fairly arbitrary manners. I like the fact that McCain-Feingold attempted to "do something" but the court has ruled that how it does it is unlawful per the 1st amendment. 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It is critical when we talk about free speech in the U.S. to understand that this freedom is limited to Congress not making laws restricting speech. It does not mean others cannot limit speech. For example, the case with "Bong Hits for Jesus", the court did not have to rule in the same manner as Congress did not pass a law limiting this speech, but rather a specific school made the decision on controlling student behavior.
nestlequ1k 17y ago
It's so much simpler than that. Read the first amendment closely one more time. "Congress shall make no law..." Where does it stipulate that this does not apply to groups with a shared financial interest? Why would anyone lean towards less free speech rather than more?

29 points by jackowayed 17y ago

"Without government, people have certain rights. They choose to surrender some of them to the government." What "natural" rights do you have without government?

ramidarigaz 17y ago
The right to kill, the right take without giving, the right to go where you want, when you want. Pretty much all the stuff that is considered to be bad today. Those are rights that the government has taken away, probably for the better ('cept for the last one. I hate fences).

Shamiq 17y ago

I want to hear what Eliezer has to say.

jfoutz 17y ago

We (the U.S.) protect rich people's freedom of speech. We protect organization's freedom of speech. Saying corporations have no freedom of speech is like saying peaceable assembly is a separate right from freedom of speech. It's not. The first amendment gets value from thousands, or millions of people getting together to say the same thing at the same time.

benpbenp 17y ago
Yes. While I understand the point of view of the article, I can also see a corporation just as a group of persons acting in concert. Each one of these persons has natural rights, so why can't they exercise these rights in concert?
- Dryw 17y ago
  Employees of the corporation may have different political views. When a corporation donates money to a political cause, it is not expressing the views of all of its employees.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  Because corporations aren't people. You can't arrest a corporation and send it to jail. You can't draft a corporation into the military (though drafting some of those defense contractors and paying their workers military salaries would sure help with the deficit). Corporations have separate rights and responsibilities from the people that own them.
  - bokonist 17y ago
    But corporations do not speak, people do. The management are all people, and the owners are all people. These people can and have been drafted into the military or arrested for illegal conduct. Congress can make no law abridging any person's freedom of speech, period.
    - jackowayed 17y ago
      There's no law keeping them from speaking just like any other person. There's (well, there was) a law keeping them from using millions of corporate dollars to broadcast that speech.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    given that, why would unions have more rights than corporations?
  - mseebach 17y ago
    > You can't arrest a corporation and send it to jail No, but you can sue it and rule against it. Ever seen a ruling with a name like "Smith vs. Acme Inc."? > Because corporations aren't people. No, and corporations also can't speak. So free speech for corporations is an oxymoron if you don't mean free speech by the people that make up a corporation.
sethg 17y ago
Before the Citizens United case came down, thousands or millions of people were free to get together to say the same thing at the same time by donating money to organizations (“527 corporations”) whose specific purpose was political advocacy. (Or they could give money directly to their favorite political parties or candidates, but then each person involved faced limits on what he or she could contribute.) What wasn’t legal was for another kind of corporation to use its general-treasury funds for the same purpose. The laws banning that kind of spending were based on the idea that when a for-profit corporation injects itself into the electoral process¹, it creates the appearance of political corruption if not actual corruption. After all, if the corporate directors authorizing the donation didn’t expect to get some kind of benefit from the politician in return, then they were wasting their stockholders’ money. The majority in Citizens United acknowledged that preventing the appearance of corruption was a legitimate concern (which is why restrictions on direct donations to political parties and candidates were allowed to stand), but was so committed to the “treat corporations as people” principle that they didn’t see the point of restricting contributions from corporations. ¹I.e., corporations could run ads saying “nuclear energy is great”, but not “vote for Smith, because he supports nuclear energy”.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  "After all, if the corporate directors authorizing the donation didn’t expect to get some kind of benefit from the politician in return" Of course. But, that thing in return might not be corrupt. Let's say you are a gun manufacturer and you give money to politicians who support the NRA. Corrupt? No more so than a gun owner making contributions for similar reasons. Beneficial? You bet.
- hga 17y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're essentially incorrect, in that one of the things Citizens United struck down was the ban on "vote for Smith" by any non-media corporation in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general). Wasn't it a specific ban from that provision in McCain-Feingold on their anti-Hillary movie that prompted them to file the lawsuit? I wasn't able to quickly determine if Citizens United itself is a 527, but they are affiliated with one (http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes2.php?ein=&cycle=2008&tname=Citizens+United http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes2.php?ein=&cycle...).

yardie 17y ago

Freedom of speech isn't a right, in human history, it's an anomaly. We've elevated it's status to a right to make sure their is no dispute of its importance. These things are only held together by the blood and sweat of the people that are willing to protect them. Corporations have neither of these qualities so I fail to understand how they qualify for something that most people can't even get for themselves.

joubert 17y ago
Freedom of speech is necessary for an effective democracy. Corporations are not citizens.

mquander 17y ago

This doesn't seem to me to have any merit, either legally or from common sense. Corporations have no rights under the Constitution? Oh, so can the FBI raid the offices of any corporation without a warrant? Could Congress pass a law prohibiting CNN from covering a war? Obviously, the Constitution should prohibit these things, and it does. The reason the court did not elaborate on its classification of corporations as "speakers" in the context of the First Amendment is that it's settled law, with a long history you could look up on Wikipedia, and none of the justices (even the dissenting ones) disagree with that classification. The dissent of the minority was based on the idea that even though corporations should enjoy a strong right to free political speech, the state's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption is great enough that it should be restricted in this case. Addendum: No, I don't think this is a really good situation, although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates. However, I think that it's just a consequence of two root problems -- the first being the great inequality of wealth (and therefore power) in our society, being nearly all concentrated in a rich elite; the second being the lack of serious and/or compulsory public financing for campaigns, so that wealth is usually a prerequisite to being elected.

joubert 17y ago
Corporations are not citizens. This means that technically they cannot cast a vote in an election. But it also means that in practice the power they can exert to effect certain political outcomes must be constrained (otherwise votes of citizens will become even more meaningless because of the asymmetry of capital concentration). You say "although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates". Surely they were not actually able to push unlimited amounts of money to influence political outcomes, otherwise there would have been no reason for the Supreme Court to make the change. Or no?
- mquander 17y ago
  Well, what I meant specifically is that corporations can influence elections indirectly via PACs and 527s, and that corporations can attempt to influence elected candidates via lobbying (and by actually getting their representatives into positions of power) so they already have some reasonably effective mechanisms for converting their money to votes. I don't think that the Supreme Court decision to enable them to spend directly on candidates really took into account very much these existing abilities one way or the other, although I'm not a lawyer and I probably haven't studied it much more than you, so maybe I'm missing some chain of reasoning.

anon-e-moose 17y ago

It's interesting to me how everyone who disagrees with this ruling keep acting like the justices are extremely confused and decided through some convoluted mental process that corporations are pretend-people. Lets look at the First Amendment, shall we? "Congress shall make no law"..."abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" Hmm... doesn't say you have to be a person. In fact it seems to just say, Congress can't make a law... abridging speech. Not speech by people, or speech by companies, or speech by the media. Just speech. As in, anyone can say whatever. Especially about politics. Justice Kennedy brilliantly points out: '"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." He also noted that since there was no way to distinguish between media and other corporations, these restrictions would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television and blogs.' (via Wikipedia) Honestly I'm not sure what's going to change... rich people and unions already dump money into politics, through various means.

cmars232 17y ago

I think the proposed heavy tax on corporate contributions makes a nicer distinction between speech with words and "speech" with money.

wycats 17y ago

Corporations aren't normal associations of people or the arguments below would be correct. They're groups of people hired by others to spend their money WITH A SPECIAL LIABILITY SHIELD. That shield protects them personally from the corporations responsibility and prevents the human rights from leaking into the artificial, government-created entity that is a corporation. The individual people involved, acting by themselves or as a group, are free to speak as much as they want, spending as much money as they want in the process. What they're not, I argue, is free to spend someone else's money through an artificial construct that shields them from all responsibility for their actions. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. If the human responsibilities assoiated with a han right are shielded, the human right is shielded too.

_delirium 17y ago
Are you arguing that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations at all then? So was the Pentagon Papers case, which ruled that the New York Times Company had a First-Amendment right to publish the Pentagon Papers free from government censorship, wrong? Maybe some individual author had the right to publish them, but the New York Times Company didn't? What about the free-speech precedents involving corporations like adult-film producers?
- Mets102 17y ago
  The New York Times didn't exercise free speech rights in publishing the Pentagon Papers. The First Amendment protects five specific rights (speech, press, religion, assembly, petition), along with protecting against an establishment of religion. The Times was using its press rights under the First Amendment. There are different lines of jurisprudence in First Amendment law depending upon the right implicated. A press case is going to be decided upon a different line of cases than a free speech case. The corporate or non-corporate form is irrelevant. It's looking to the substance. There's a difference between freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Freedom of the press protects the ability to report the news. It's rooted in the the British government prosecuting those publishing stories critical of the government as seditious libel, giving rise to the maxim, "the greater the truth, the greater the libel." Speech, in contrast, is the speaking of opinion. The Times did not do this in publishing the Pentagon Papers. There is a difference between a newspaper with corporate form publishing the news and a corporation such as ExxonMobil or Google effectively advocating for a specific candidate.

gfunk911 17y ago

The merits of this decision are a legitimete topic for debate. I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about it. The point that I feel like those who are against it completely miss (and that anti-business people generally miss) is that corporations are just groups of people. It's people/turtles all the way down. A quote that I found interesting, even though I do not agree 100%: "Until today, we had the right to free speech, and the right to assembly, but not the right to free speech when we were assembled. The Supreme Court has thankfully corrected that absurdity." http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/01/good-news-for-free-speech.html http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/01/good-news-for-...

joubert 17y ago
There is a huge power asymmetry between a corporation and a natural person. If the former is able to voice their political opinion without constraint (e.g. Enron spends, say $1 billion dollars in an election), they can effectively manipulate our democracy, drowning out citizens' political will. This is what just happened when the (conservative) Supreme Court overturned the limits on corporate spending in political campaigns. Moreover, it now enables foreign corporations to manipulate election outcomes.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  Lets be clear what we mean by "manipulate" and "drowning out citizens' political will": the corporation may use speech to persuade voters to vote a certain way. So it isn't so much "drowning out" citizen's political will as persuading them to exercise it in a certain way.
  - joubert 17y ago
    If an organization is able to purchase all the advertising space in a jurisdiction, they can effectively decide how people will vote. Consider the Prop 8 smear campaign in California by the Mormon Church.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago

lmkg 17y ago

While I generally agree with the article and disagree with the SCOTUS ruling, I do have to take exception to this statement: > However, corporations do not exist outside of government If you take the "corporations are most certainly not people" position (and I do), then a corporation is an agreement between a group of people with a mutual economic interest. That's not a government creation, that's a naturally arising phenomenon. You don't need any sort of government to create a corporation, although contract law would help. But I don't think it's possible to have contracts without corporations arising naturally and organically. Am I missing something? Obviously, the US has passed a lot of laws giving corporations particular rights, responsibilities, liabilities, privileges, etc. But that doesn't mean that corporations are government creations, in the same way that citizen's rights are natural right that are recognized rather than granted.

wycats 17y ago
You're thinking about partnerships, which are the associations of people others are talking about (created, as you point out, via contract law). Corporation are special entities created by governments to shield the executives from persoanl responsibility for their actions as executives. In THAT capacity, I argue that the corporation does not inherit human rights because of the shield that protects the underlying individuals for responsibility for their actions.
joubert 17y ago
A corporation is established in terms of a Companies Act or the like in terms of Corporate Law (particulars depend on the jurisdiction). A corporation is a legal person, but not a natural person. A corporation is not an agreement between a group of people. People can agree to form a corporation, but the corporation itself is not an agreement (merely the end result). For example, a corporation can act against the interests of the people who founded it.

techiferous 17y ago

What I find ironic is that we experience a fair amount of cognitive disequilibrium when we discuss the legal rights of corporations in comparison with the legal rights of individuals, but we aren't bothered by the difference between the legal rights of humans and the legal rights of animals. IMO, the basic rights of human individuals are more similar to the rights of advanced animals (like pigs) than they are to the rights of corporations.

nhebb 17y ago
Because no one wants to get sued by their breakfast sausage.

grellas 17y ago

Were corporations not accorded protections under the Bill of Rights (as argued in this piece on the theory that "state-created entities" are artificial and were not intended to be covered by such protections), among other things: 1. The government could conduct searches and seizures at will of corporate property in disregard of the Fourth Amendment. 2. It could take corporate property without compensation in disregard of the Fifth. 3. It could deny the rights of free speech to the New York Times and other corporate entities in disregard of the First. 4. It could deny the right of religious expression to churches, synagogues and other religious organizations that are incorporated. Nor, if the logic of this piece were to be followed that "state-created entities" should not be protected under the Bill of Rights, would any other legally-recognized entity be entitled to such protections. How about: 1. Universities. 2. Schools. 3. Charities. 4. Partnerships, LLCs, trusts, and other business entities (want the government to confiscate the IP or other assets of your startup and say it owes you nothing because it is not you but a mere "state-created entity" from which it is taking the property?). This list could go on and on at great length. The analysis in this piece may be something that one may want to advocate as some sort of ideal but, in terms of law, history, etc., it is quite flawed. I think this is more a talking point in the recent uproar over the Citizens United case than it is a serious point of constitutional discussion.

wycats 17y ago
Let's actually take a look at the two scenarios. In the case of corporation-owned property, the shareholders indirectly own the property itself. If the government takes away the property, the shareholders lose the property, and the government violates the takings clause insofar as individual humans have lost money. In the case of corporate speech, the shareholders are not speaking at all. Instead, executives are speaking, protected from the consequences of their speech by the corporate shield. In comparison with the above case, nothing stops the individual executives or the individual shareholders from speaking, either by themselves or in concert with others. What I'm suggesting is that the form of the corporation, which the government created to shield actors from the consequences of their actions, is not itself afforded the right to speech.
- 17y ago

jhancock 17y ago

I have been thinking of another aspect of this case. One that obviates net neutrality, IMO. The ruling against McCain-Feingold states that government does not have the power to create penalties (criminal or civil) that limit speech. In the case of McCain-Feingold, the court ruled that it was enough to base its ruling simply on the assumption that the law "may" limit speech, without proof that it actually has. I think this is reasonable. Here is where it unravels: There are other laws the government has passed that provide penalties as McCain-Feingold does. A key example is broadcast spectrum sales. The FCC has sold rights of public spectrum and provides criminal penalties for infringing on the use of that spectrum. This of course creates third party arbiters of content and has provably limited speech. Case in point: next week's SuperBowl will show an ad against abortion but has refused an ad for a gay dating site. Political ads are refused all the time by major broadcasters when they do not suit the content arbiters. I think the duplicity of the court lies in the cases they refuse to hear that should apply the same logic as this ruling. Does anyone know of examples of such cases that have been refused or ruled against?

hga 17y ago
I think you misunderstand what was struck down in McCain-Feingold: an explicit ban on non-media corporate speech advocating the election or defeat of a candidate in the 1-2 months before a Federal election (1 for a primary, 2 for a general).
- jhancock 17y ago
  What was struck down was Congress passing a law that restricts speech and the rational as published by the court clearly shows this is why the law was struck down. McCain-Feingold does restrict speech and does so in fairly arbitrary manners. I like the fact that McCain-Feingold attempted to "do something" but the court has ruled that how it does it is unlawful per the 1st amendment. 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It is critical when we talk about free speech in the U.S. to understand that this freedom is limited to Congress not making laws restricting speech. It does not mean others cannot limit speech. For example, the case with "Bong Hits for Jesus", the court did not have to rule in the same manner as Congress did not pass a law limiting this speech, but rather a specific school made the decision on controlling student behavior.

nestlequ1k 17y ago

It's so much simpler than that. Read the first amendment closely one more time. "Congress shall make no law..." Where does it stipulate that this does not apply to groups with a shared financial interest? Why would anyone lean towards less free speech rather than more?