Corporate personhood what does it mean

Many people disagree with personhood. They don't feel businesses should have the same rights as people. However, getting rid of personhood would be very difficult. It would also be harmful to businesses everywhere. People against personhood don't feel it's fair that a wealthy business has the same rights as its workers.

They feel like personhood gives businesses more power than real people. BCL defined corporations as "artificial persons. Being an artificial person meant that corporations did not have legal rights. They only had privileges that could be taken at any time. The history of corporate personhood starts with the Constitution. Important events that led to full corporate personhood include:.

Woodward, Chief Justice John Marshall states that corporations do not deserve Constitutional protections. William McKinley decides to seek corporate donations in and Southern Pacific Railroad Co. They also receive some 5th Amendment protections. New York strikes down a law that attempted to limit worker hours. This ruling stood for 30 years. Henkel case gives 4th Amendment Rights to corporations.

The Act includes labor unions in Corporate personhood stalled over the next 30 years. The modern push for corporate rights started in It now includes limits on campaign spending and donations.

Valeo decides that political advertising is free speech. Direct contributions are still illegal. Virgina Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council gives 1st Amendment rights to some commercial speech. First National Bank of Boston removes a ban on for-profit corporations spending money for political referendums.

One major reason was lack of financial innovations like income taxes, and another was the possibility of bankruptcy, which could threaten an entire state that accepted all of the risk of its investments: indeed, unprofitable canal projects and the Panic of left Illinois and Pennsylvania, among other states, broke. Dixon v. United States, 7 F.

Georgia, 2 U. Winkler begins his narrative with a handful of these early corporations, including the Massachusetts Bay Company p. All of these corporations functioned internally as governments and externally as agencies for larger governments. Although the company was dissolved before the Revolution, its corporate structure continued to guide not only the states that declared independence but also the business and educational corporations that followed in its footsteps p.

Even though neither oversaw any territory, they had a similar governmental structure — with elected board members representing shareholders or other constituents — and were also literally government agencies pp.

In McCulloch v. And in the lead-up to Dartmouth College v. Woodward , the legislature of New Hampshire treated Dartmouth as if it were any other public school pp.

Over the course of We the Corporations , however, Winkler explains how the lawyers for the Bank, the university, and similar corporations convinced courts to award their clients legal protections from interference by the governments that created them. Winkler demonstrates that by the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court had held consistently that the same constitutional provisions protecting individuals from government power also protected corporations from government power pp.

The corporation — an institution that began its history as a literal government — has grown up to assert rights against it. How did this happen? Adams, Jr. Chandler, Jr. Friedman, A History of American Law —39 3d ed. Of course, not all corporations made this transition; municipal corporations became even more heavily regulated during this period.

See Gerald E. Even today, some for-profit corporations are so closely identified with their government of creation that constitutional limits apply to the corporation as well. Owners, Inc. Although this focus may seem a little parochial to nonlawyers, it allows Winkler to correct a common misunderstanding — the one that has proliferated since the Year of the Corporate Person — about how lawyers have won constitutional rights for corporations.

Daily Oct. Diamond, Occupy Santa Clara! Corporate Personhood Reconsidered , Dissent Apr. See also Blackstone, supra note Louis Ry. Beckwith, U. Closely analyzing the arguments of the advocates who represented the Bank of the United States, Dartmouth College, and other corporations before the Supreme Court, Winkler persuasively and colorfully argues that these lawyers won rights for their clients by embracing corporate statehood : calling their clients democratic institutions, like the Massachusetts Bay Company, in which elected executives represent shareholding, rights-bearing constituents.

In , for example, lawyers for the Bank of the United States made this sort of argument to explain why the Supreme Court should protect their client from a passionate Georgia tax collector p. Although the Supremacy Clause of the U. VI, cl. When Bank of United States v. Maryland a decade later. McCulloch v. Rather, the question was whether the Court even had the power to hear the case.

Article III of the U. Peter Deveaux was, indisputably, a proud citizen of Georgia. The lawyers for Georgia not only found this argument ridiculous, but also thought it contradicted the common law doctrine of corporate personhood. That doctrine was what gave the corporation the power to sue Deveaux in its own name, and it was the reason the case was called Bank of the United States v. State lawyers, baffled at how a corporation could claim to be its own person for purposes of debt and liability but claim to be lots of persons for purposes of constitutional rights, argued that corporations were legal persons whose rights and obligations were distinct from those of its human members.

But the arguments often led to contrasting results. Arguments rooted in corporate personhood , by contrast, emphasized the unitary nature of the corporation to highlight the absurdity of giving a legal fiction the same rights as a human being. Trustees of Dartmouth Coll. Woodward, 17 U. The corporation is the assignee of their rights, stands in their place, and distributes their bounty, as they would themselves have distributed it, had they been immortal.

Similarly, in a series of s railroad cases beginning with Santa Clara County v. See Santa Clara Cty. The author quotes Pembina , U. Patterson, U. Take Bank of Augusta v. The case arose out of the Panic of , which put many people, including Alabama businessman Joseph B. Earle, in severe debt pp. Earle tried to get out of an obligation he owed to the Bank of Augusta, a Georgia corporation, by arguing that Alabama law prohibited certain out-of-state banks from operating there p.

See Horwitz , supra note Taney, Speech of Mr. Taney at Elkton, Md. The author quotes Earle , 38 U. Earle , 38 U. A Georgia corporation could operate in Alabama, therefore, only if Alabama public policy recognized the legitimacy of the Georgia law that created the corporation. But he strongly suggests that either the Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment should embrace corporate personhood p.

As Winkler recognizes, most other civil rights movements have pursued claims of equality through a variety of means, including litigation, direct action, civil disobedience, lobbying, and mass mobilization p. It is also what makes it possible for a government to sue a corporation for damage caused by an oil spill. It is simply a reflection of the fact that personhood is a legal convention, a way for courts to behave with regard to corporations, rather than a description of their nature.

This means that the notion of corporate personhood applies to them too. The Concise Encyclopedia of Business Ethics.

Skip to content. Corporate Personhood Corporate personhood is the ethical and legal concept according to which corporations may be treated — morally or legally — as entities independent of the human beings associated with them. We are all of opinion that it does. But the damage was done. Later cases uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.

Dissenting in Wheeling Steel Corp. But they could not convince their fellow Justices. In the s, Santa Clara was used to justify granting corporations the First Amendment right to spend unlimited corporate funds on ballot initiatives in a case called Bellotti. Hobby Lobby Stores , the store chain is claiming that the corporation and not just its proprietors has a religious objection to providing certain types of birth control for its workers as required by the Affordable Care Act.

Thus, the Court is contemplating expanding corporate personhood to a new logical extreme: First Amendment religious rights.