Comment & Debate
David Newquist. “The grammar of libel.” Kelo. January 30, 2010: “To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language. […] The English lexicon has from its inception defined a person as a human, an individual of specified character, the personality of a human self. To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language.
[…] The literature of America deals extensively with the idea that inalienable rights accrue to natural persons but not to artificial ones.
The issue with the Supreme Court decision is that the majority opinion does not adhere to that distinction of what is considered an authentic person and equates corporations with natural persons in defining that matter of rights.”
“Corporate Free Speech.” Law Offices of Joseph Markowitz. January 21, 2010: “The Court also conflated the rights of corporate “persons” with the rights of natural persons. There are good reasons for treating corporations as persons under the law. It may even be necessary for the law to have adopted that legal fiction in order to hold corporations legally accountable for their actions. But it does not necessarily follow that fictional persons should have exactly the same rights as human beings. Corporations are legal creations of the state.
If they are to be considered as being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” their Creator is still a different creator than the one who created human beings. It would not even make sense to grant certain human rights to corporations, such as the right to vote (mentioned in the dissent), or the right to marry. As Justice Stevens stated in dissent:
[C]orporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. . . . [T]hey are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.
Instead of treating corporations as disfavored persons, however, as Justice Stevens and the other dissenters advocated, the Supreme Court invoked the values behind the First Amendment to support a vision in which all interests groups can freely participate, limited only by their imaginations and their wallets. It may be worrisome to imagine a world in which the networks are flooded with corporate political advertising, and candidates appear to be sponsored by corporations, but that is the wide-open world the Supreme Court now envisions, in which the best remedy for potentially harmful or misleading speech may be the opportunity to present more speech.”