Wednesday, January 22, 2020

QUORA: ‘Since corporations are not actual people, how does John Roberts justify legally defining them as such?’



I posted this answer:

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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