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It sounds funny because it is in the context of Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions

It sounds funny because it is in the context of Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from making expenditures in connection with federal elections. In that case, the law which was about limiting influence on campaigns through money was ruled invalid because corporations should have rights as people in addition to the rights of the people themselves.

kube-system 4y ago
I’m not going to defend citizens united, but the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation. That’s really just an issue with the 1st amendment that should be further amended, not an issue with the concept of corporate personhood. The concept of “natural personhood” exists to handle cases where the differentiation is necessary, and it’s the legislature’s job to use it.
- feoren 4y ago
  > that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation Nobody in that group of people has lost anything. If 10 people walk into a room, you have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room. If they organize into a corporation, you have 11 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room!? Without Citizen's United, you simply still have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights. Who's losing anything?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think the critical question is if freedom of speech still applies to a group of individual people working together. Corporations don't have first amendment rights, but the Individuals do. The idea is that just because you work with someone else to put up posters, your right to put them up doesn't go away. Same if you hire someone to put up your posters. That's all that corporate personhood means. People get very hung up on the language.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    “Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”. And “legal person” is just a fancy shortening of “anything that can interact with the court system, whether a single person or a group of people” People get very caught up on the legalese but it is perfectly logical when you move past that. Yes, if 10 people form a corporation, that is 11 entities recognizable by a court system that has first amendment rights. All 10 humans can criticize the president at home, and you can do so work in an official capacity without your corporation facing consequences.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      > “Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”. It absolutely is not. It creates an entity to which actions can be attributed but the responsibility for its actions does not and generally cannot extend to "people who make up the group". Somce of us believe that even though there are benefits to society from allowing such entities to exist, these entities should not be accorded the rights of personhood. [ EDIT: should NOT be accorded ]
      - kube-system 4y ago
        “Natural person” is the legal term used to differentiate between humans and corporations when necessary. The concept of corporate personhood does not undermine the legal systems ability to differentiate between the two. If a law shouldn’t apply to human person but not a corporation, the law simply need to specify “natural person”. Corporate personhood doesn’t interfere with this.
        PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Citizens was decided not on the basis of a law, but the US Constitution, which does not make the distinction you refer to. SCOTUS ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict the speech rights of corporations, so even if the original Congressionally-passed, Presidentially-signed law had been specific about the type of "persons" it referred to, SCOTUS would (under the logic of Citizens) have overruled it as unconstitutional.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation In that argument each individual people keep their 1st amendment right, but the group just doesn’t get a new one. Put it another way: suppose there’s 3 physical people, why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8 legal people ?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    The group does get a new right. The government can’t fine Alice for political speech. The government can’t fine Bob for political speech. AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech. > Put it another way: suppose there’s 3 physical people, why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8 legal people ? Because they can belong to more than one group. I own parts of dozens of corporations along with as many as hundreds of thousands of other people. When one of them does something wrong, they can be sued with one name, rather than suing me and each of their thousands of other owners individually for their portion of the investment.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      > AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech. This is where opinions differ. Because I am absolutely fine with the concept that "Alice and Bob, Inc" has none of the rights of personhood (really, citizenship), and that if there was a statute that allowed for prosecution of political speech, it could be used to silence "Alice and Bob, Inc." even though it cannot be used to silence Alice or Bob. Notice that as a matter of nuance, I differentiate between for-profit corporations and other forms of corporations. I would accord some (perhaps all) of the speech rights of persons to the latter, but none of them to the former. By incorporating with a structure created to facilitate the generation and distribution of profit, you acknowledge that the corporation thus created does not have the rights of personhood.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        I definitely disagree with giving the government the ability to retaliate against corporations for political speech. Or, to seize their property without a warrant. Could you imagine if the Trump administration had the legal right to seize property at Twitter, WaPo, etc?
- rexreed 4y ago
  You might be surprised then about the total impact of Citizens United because it's not as basic as you imply. "That decision and subsequent lower court decisions have led to SuperPACs, which allow corporations, unions and individuals to make unlimited contributions, pool them together, and use the money for political campaigns." https://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147294511/understanding-the-i https://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147294511/understanding-the-i... This goes well beyond what the law was intending to limit for influence on companies on politics. And that was the point of the whole supreme court case. I for one am not happy with unlimited money spent by huge companies who are using shareholder money to fund political contributions that further their own motives. But hey sure, let's argue that AI systems shouldn't get patents, but corporations should be free to influence politics as much as they want with unlimited money.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    You are not following what I am saying. I agree that corporations shouldn’t be able to spend unlimited money on politics.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation. It's not "silly" at all. Corporations can do things that people cannot - like cause damage, death, destruction and not involve their owners in the responsibility. It makes sense that the owners can do things that the corporation cannot, like have free speech rights. Besides, nobody was suggesting that the individual owners lost their individual speech rights by incorporating, merely that incorporation creates an entity that ought not to have free speech rights.
ghaff 4y ago
Newspapers of course have the right to endorse candidates and support or oppose the adoption of various laws and policies. And other companies routinely make statements for or against legal decisions, laws, etc. None of which I think it's fair to say is especially controversial. (Though some would probably argue that company advocacy especially with respect to policies that are probably divisive even among their own employees should perhaps be minimized.) Unless you're going to ban or greatly limit political contributions across the board by deciding they aren't really speech, it's not clear drawing a line between natural people donating and corporations donating makes a lot of sense so long as both have freedom of speech.
abigail95 4y ago
No. The people have the right to spend their money on elections via free exercise. What was ruled unconstitutional were laws that said you can't spend money on an election if you do it via some corporate structure. If a newspaper prints an article, is the government allowed to say it can't publish it because the newspaper is a corporation? Obviously not. Is the corporation now a person with free exercise? No, the journalists who wrote the article are the ones with the rights.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kube-system 4y ago

I’m not going to defend citizens united, but the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation. That’s really just an issue with the 1st amendment that should be further amended, not an issue with the concept of corporate personhood. The concept of “natural personhood” exists to handle cases where the differentiation is necessary, and it’s the legislature’s job to use it.

feoren 4y ago
> that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation Nobody in that group of people has lost anything. If 10 people walk into a room, you have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room. If they organize into a corporation, you have 11 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights in that room!? Without Citizen's United, you simply still have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment rights. Who's losing anything?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think the critical question is if freedom of speech still applies to a group of individual people working together. Corporations don't have first amendment rights, but the Individuals do. The idea is that just because you work with someone else to put up posters, your right to put them up doesn't go away. Same if you hire someone to put up your posters. That's all that corporate personhood means. People get very hung up on the language.
- kube-system 4y ago
  “Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”. And “legal person” is just a fancy shortening of “anything that can interact with the court system, whether a single person or a group of people” People get very caught up on the legalese but it is perfectly logical when you move past that. Yes, if 10 people form a corporation, that is 11 entities recognizable by a court system that has first amendment rights. All 10 humans can criticize the president at home, and you can do so work in an official capacity without your corporation facing consequences.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > “Corporate personhood” is just a fancy legal word for “group of people”. It absolutely is not. It creates an entity to which actions can be attributed but the responsibility for its actions does not and generally cannot extend to "people who make up the group". Somce of us believe that even though there are benefits to society from allowing such entities to exist, these entities should not be accorded the rights of personhood. [ EDIT: should NOT be accorded ]
    - kube-system 4y ago
      “Natural person” is the legal term used to differentiate between humans and corporations when necessary. The concept of corporate personhood does not undermine the legal systems ability to differentiate between the two. If a law shouldn’t apply to human person but not a corporation, the law simply need to specify “natural person”. Corporate personhood doesn’t interfere with this.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Citizens was decided not on the basis of a law, but the US Constitution, which does not make the distinction you refer to. SCOTUS ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict the speech rights of corporations, so even if the original Congressionally-passed, Presidentially-signed law had been specific about the type of "persons" it referred to, SCOTUS would (under the logic of Citizens) have overruled it as unconstitutional.
makeitdouble 4y ago
> that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation In that argument each individual people keep their 1st amendment right, but the group just doesn’t get a new one. Put it another way: suppose there’s 3 physical people, why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8 legal people ?
- kube-system 4y ago
  The group does get a new right. The government can’t fine Alice for political speech. The government can’t fine Bob for political speech. AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech. > Put it another way: suppose there’s 3 physical people, why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8 legal people ? Because they can belong to more than one group. I own parts of dozens of corporations along with as many as hundreds of thousands of other people. When one of them does something wrong, they can be sued with one name, rather than suing me and each of their thousands of other owners individually for their portion of the investment.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > AND the government can’t fine “Alice and Bob, Inc.” for political speech. This is where opinions differ. Because I am absolutely fine with the concept that "Alice and Bob, Inc" has none of the rights of personhood (really, citizenship), and that if there was a statute that allowed for prosecution of political speech, it could be used to silence "Alice and Bob, Inc." even though it cannot be used to silence Alice or Bob. Notice that as a matter of nuance, I differentiate between for-profit corporations and other forms of corporations. I would accord some (perhaps all) of the speech rights of persons to the latter, but none of them to the former. By incorporating with a structure created to facilitate the generation and distribution of profit, you acknowledge that the corporation thus created does not have the rights of personhood.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I definitely disagree with giving the government the ability to retaliate against corporations for political speech. Or, to seize their property without a warrant. Could you imagine if the Trump administration had the legal right to seize property at Twitter, WaPo, etc?
rexreed 4y ago
You might be surprised then about the total impact of Citizens United because it's not as basic as you imply. "That decision and subsequent lower court decisions have led to SuperPACs, which allow corporations, unions and individuals to make unlimited contributions, pool them together, and use the money for political campaigns." https://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147294511/understanding-the-i https://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147294511/understanding-the-i... This goes well beyond what the law was intending to limit for influence on companies on politics. And that was the point of the whole supreme court case. I for one am not happy with unlimited money spent by huge companies who are using shareholder money to fund political contributions that further their own motives. But hey sure, let's argue that AI systems shouldn't get patents, but corporations should be free to influence politics as much as they want with unlimited money.
- kube-system 4y ago
  You are not following what I am saying. I agree that corporations shouldn’t be able to spend unlimited money on politics.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a corporation. It's not "silly" at all. Corporations can do things that people cannot - like cause damage, death, destruction and not involve their owners in the responsibility. It makes sense that the owners can do things that the corporation cannot, like have free speech rights. Besides, nobody was suggesting that the individual owners lost their individual speech rights by incorporating, merely that incorporation creates an entity that ought not to have free speech rights.

ghaff 4y ago

Newspapers of course have the right to endorse candidates and support or oppose the adoption of various laws and policies. And other companies routinely make statements for or against legal decisions, laws, etc. None of which I think it's fair to say is especially controversial. (Though some would probably argue that company advocacy especially with respect to policies that are probably divisive even among their own employees should perhaps be minimized.) Unless you're going to ban or greatly limit political contributions across the board by deciding they aren't really speech, it's not clear drawing a line between natural people donating and corporations donating makes a lot of sense so long as both have freedom of speech.

abigail95 4y ago

No. The people have the right to spend their money on elections via free exercise. What was ruled unconstitutional were laws that said you can't spend money on an election if you do it via some corporate structure. If a newspaper prints an article, is the government allowed to say it can't publish it because the newspaper is a corporation? Obviously not. Is the corporation now a person with free exercise? No, the journalists who wrote the article are the ones with the rights.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]