When was it decided that corporations are people

Description Reviews. The U. Supreme Court launched a heated debate when it ruled in Citizens United that corporations can claim the same free speech rights as humans. Should they be able to claim rights of free speech, religious conscience, and due process? Kent Greenfield provides an answer: Sometimes. The problem with Citizens United is not that corporations have a right to speak, but for whom they speak.

The solution is not to end corporate personhood but to require corporations to act more like citizens. Within states, Wilson noted, "smaller societies may be formed by a part of its members. A legal corporation, then, is "described to be a person in a political capacity created by the law. These "artificial persons," he observed, "have been formed to promote and to perpetuate the interests of commerce, of learning, and of religion. Because of this long tradition of legal understanding, it is not unusual for the word "person," when found in legal texts, to apply to corporations.

In this common parlance, it simply means that corporations have certain legal rights and responsibilities. Congress acknowledged this principle explicitly in the so-called Dictionary Act of , which laid down rules for construing federal laws. Contained in Section 1 of Title I of the United States Code, this provision notes that, "unless the context indicates otherwise," the "words 'person' and 'whoever' include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.

The Constitution, moreover, is a legal text, written and ratified by men steeped in this legal tradition according to which corporations are artificial persons capable of holding certain rights under the law. Accordingly, the view that some constitutional rights attach to corporations as well as individuals is by no means a conservative manipulation of law, as the opponents of corporate personhood suggest. To be sure, a given reference to "persons" and their rights in the Constitution may or may not be intended to refer to corporations.

Frequently, as the language of the Dictionary Act indicates regarding the interpretation of statutes, it depends on the context. For example, the framers surely did not intend to refer to corporations when they provided that representation in the House of Representatives shall be determined with reference to "the whole Number of free Persons" in each state.

The Census Bureau, then, quite properly does not count corporations when ascertaining each state's population. Similarly, when the Constitution holds that "no Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years," it is certainly not suggesting that a corporation could be elected to Congress.

And yet, one cannot easily dismiss the idea that some constitutional provisions do properly apply to corporations as well as individuals. But this is exactly what the left is now attempting with its flat, simple claim that "corporations are not people. Progressives are, as a matter of fact, wrong on the question of whether corporations are people under American law.

But the evidence for this is not limited to the English legal tradition and the legal educations of the framers and their successors. If indeed corporations were not people, as progressives insist, strange and dangerous consequences would quickly follow. For instance, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides that "no person shall be This would mean that a corporation's property could be taken arbitrarily, with no compensation, for any reason and at any time.

Surely the American founders, who were ardent advocates of the right to property, did not intend this passage to protect the property rights only of individuals and not of corporations. If the founders did not believe government is required to guarantee the property rights of corporations, then they conceded that natural persons could make their property subject to arbitrary and uncompensated seizure by the government by placing it in a corporation.

But as Hamilton observed in his Opinion as to the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States , the very point of allowing incorporation is, in the first place, to permit "one or more natural persons" to "hold property" together as a single, legal person. Setting aside the framers' intentions, committing ourselves to denying corporate personhood would mean stripping corporations of their property rights and making their property subject to arbitrary seizure without compensation.

Private companies and businesses, which are nothing more than corporations, would have little choice but to close down. Non-profits, including traditionally left-of-center ones like the Sierra Club and the NAACP, would also be subject to property expropriation by the government.

Other examples of corporate rights derived from the Constitution abound. The Fourth Amendment protects the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also mean states could enact laws discriminating against corporations based on the owner's race, religion, sex, or any other currently protected characteristic.

To do so would mean not only misreading the Constitution, but also subjecting the private cooperation of private citizens to potential tyranny. Of course, the idea that corporations have both property rights and equal-protection rights has not raised the left's ire so much as the notion that they have rights to freedom of speech and religion.

The left has vehemently denounced these rulings, despite the fact that the opinions come from straightforward readings of the relevant constitutional and legal provisions. The First Amendment does not use the word "person" when protecting freedom of speech. It simply states that "Congress shall make no law The provision seeks to protect "freedom of speech," without any reference to who is speaking, whether one or many, and, if many, how they are organized.

The plainest reading of the amendment, therefore, would protect the speech of both individuals and corporations, and even groups that are not formally incorporated. All of this seems to support the Court's conclusion in Citizens United that the Constitution protects the speech rights of corporations. Furthermore, unacceptable consequences would result from any attempt to deny corporations the freedoms of the First Amendment.

This would mean that the Times , simply because it is an artificial person, lacks the right to speak freely. It would also mean that the Times is not protected by the freedom of the press, which is enshrined in the First Amendment just after to the right of free speech. The left is not unaware of the practical consequences of their simplistic assault on corporate personhood. More often than not, they try to exempt certain institutions in proposals to curb the results of court decisions like Citizens United.

For example, a failed constitutional amendment proposed by Senate Democrats would have empowered Congress to prohibit corporations from spending money to "influence elections. Moreover, the proposed amendment would not even have tried to exclude all corporations from exerting influence on elections: It carved out an exemption for the institutional media. And why should the institutional press have a right to influence elections, while that right is withheld from other corporations?

The rules of judicial ethics were not well developed in the Gilded Age, however, and the self-assured Field, who feared the forces of socialism, did not hesitate to weigh in. So, with Field on the Court, still more twists were yet to come. The reporter in the s was J.

His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the faux precedent in the Southern Pacific case would go on to be used by a Supreme Court that in the early 20th century became famous for striking down numerous economic regulations, including federal child-labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws. Meanwhile, in cases like the notorious Plessy v.

Ferguson , those same justices refused to read the Constitution as protecting the rights of African Americans, the real intended beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Under U. So, what is the 14th Amendment again? Ratified in , it was one of three amendments to the U. Constitution designed to grant full citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people. While the 13th and 15th Amendments were relatively limited in scope—the first abolished slavery and the second granted voting rights to black men—the 14th Amendment exponentially expanded the protection of civil rights for all Americans.

What is due process and how does it work? The fundamental principle of due process goes back to the Magna Carta , the 13th century English charter that inspired the framers of the U. Due process ensures that all levels of government operate within the law and provide fair procedures for everyone.

In practice, the Supreme Court has used the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to guarantee some of the most fundamental rights and liberties we enjoy today.