I take the question to refer
to the legal doctrine called “corporate personhood.”
The question is a little
misleading. It’s true only humans are people, and of course corporations aren’t
“actual people”. Private corporations are voluntary associations of
individuals, each of whom has rights. A group, as such, has no rights. But
among the rights of individuals is the right to express their individual rights
collectively, through a group. This is the right of freedom of association,
expressed in the First Amendment as “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging
. . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble. [*]”* This right is what
the legal doctrine of “corporate personhood” is designed to protect.
Contrary to its critics, the
Supreme Court never legally defined corporations as “actual people” distinct
from the people who comprise it. For example, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled “A corporation is
simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An
established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of people
(including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with the
corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or
statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the
rights of these people.” [page 18, my emphasis]
In other words, the “rights”
of corporations are nothing more than extensions of the rights of the
corporation’s owners and/or employees, who are actual people. The associates of
corporations do not forfeit their individual rights simply by joining
corporations any more than individuals would forfeit their rights by organizing
into other types of groups such as professional associations, churches,
families, political or intellectual advocacy movements, recreational
organizations like book clubs or bowling leagues, charitable institutions, or
unions. Nor do corporations gain rights that the underlying individual
members don’t have. Corporate “rights”, like the “rights” of any group,
are merely extensions of the actual rights of actual individuals acting through
freedom of association, nothing less and nothing more.
To deny the “rights” of
corporations—corporate personhood, properly understood—is to deny the rights of
individuals, including the rights of association, speech, contract, property,
free trade, equal protection and other rights individuals may choose to
exercise cooperatively to achieve some common desired end, which can be any
peaceful purpose the owners choose.
[ * This right of free
association is listed in the context of freedom of religion, speech, press, and
petitioning of the government, which the framers considered to be inextricably
linked; that is, to violate one is to violate all. But it logically extends to
all individual rights, including rights to property and free trade.]
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