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But the basis of decisions like Citizens United is that corporations have rights (free speech and so on) because they're just collections of people, who have th

But the basis of decisions like Citizens United is that corporations have rights (free speech and so on) because they're just collections of people, who have those rights as individuals. The key idea behind CU is that people don't give up those rights just because they formed a corporation. In other words, the rights of corporations are really just the rights of the people in them. If there are no people in them, I could very easily see a judge deciding the corporation itself has no rights.

ergothus 9y ago
> If there are no people in them, I could very easily see a judge deciding the corporation itself has no rights I might quibble with "very easily", but I don't argue your core point. I can, however, ALSO see a judge ruling that any corporation that employs humans retains rights in the name of the interests of those humans. Not a guarantee, possibly even a stretch, but believable (And CU did NOT say "the humans of a corp are not limited in their free speech outside of the corp, therefore the actions of the corp can be limited without similarly restricting the rights of those humans", so I'll stick by my 'corps have legal entity status beyond their humans' suspicions, particularly given how long corps have had legal status in multiple countries before CU was even a concept. Regardless of right/wrong, if a reasonable case can be made either way, then there's a good reason to not have full confidence that self-owning corporations would be tossed out of court, which was my point.