Abolish Corporate Personhood - A (long) WILPF Primer
MichaelP
See http://www.wilpf.org/corp/cintro.htm for additional info
Corporate Personhood is a U$ fabrication which made it easier for mega
corporations to speak openly - loudly overpowering the voices of real
people. In the U$ the status of corporate personhood could be removed -
since it doesn't exist elsewhere it can't be removed - perhaps that means
the problem with mega corporations has more to do with the control of mega
bank accounts and less to do with actual expression.
MichaelP
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" Abolish Corporate Personhood" by Jan Edwards & Molly Morgan [of WILPF]
*Jan Edwards lives in Point Arena, CA <janed...@mcn.org>
*Molly Morgan lives in San Diego, CA <mor...@sdsc.edu>
Here's the latest comprehensive article from two leaders of the growing
movement to abolish corporate personhood and build authentic democracy in
the USA. It was originally published in slightly different forms in the
National Lawyers Guild Law Review and the New College Law Review this
month. See the list at the very end of this email for other groups working
on these critical issues.
ABOLISH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD
Concerned about the rapid escalation of corporate power in the US and
around the world, three years ago members of the US section of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) began studying and
researching how corporations became so powerful. We discovered the hidden
history of "corporate personhood" - the legal phenomenon that provides
constitutional protections to corporations. Not only is corporate
personhood a key component of corporate power, it's one of the greatest
threats to democracy that we've ever known. Most people, however, have
never even heard of it. In September, 2001 WILPF launched a campaign to
abolish corporate personhood that has as its goal to delegitimize the
institution of the corporation as a political entity. The following
article is by WILPF members Jan Edwards and Molly Morgan.
The history of the United States can be told as the story of who is and
who is not a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves and even
corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following
the law. Early laws were written "No person shall...," but only white men
of property were considered persons for legal purposes. In an effort to
avoid these laws, lawyers claimed corporations were not persons and
therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for
purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed
corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But
corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were
women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. All of us tend to be
familiar with the struggles of human beings to gain rights of persons
under law. But how did corporations gain these rights?
To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking
at the foundation of US law, the Constitution of the United States of
America. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by
one historian as "the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the
well-wed." As some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the new
country, they were highly aware that their power had everything to do with
how much property they owned - land, crops, buildings, personal goods,
and, for most of them, property in the form of human beings, their slaves.
As some of the best-educated men in the world, at least by European
standards, they also knew a lot about democracy, and they understood what
a threat the real thing represented to their personal power. The kind of
democracy they prized and wrote about so eloquently could only be
practiced by people like them - certainly not by the rabble. Many of them
wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be
self-governing.
So the word "democracy" appears nowhere in the Constitution. What they
created was a republic designed to protect property, not people. This
didn't play very well with many people in the new United States - at least
half of the population was very much opposed to the Constitution. They
could see how much power it would take away from them, how much it would
compromise the democratic ideals in the Declaration for Independence, and
they wanted no part of it. But the Federalists who proposed the
Constitution had the finances and the unity to promote their ideas
strongly. After a lot of politicking they got the Constitution ratified -
but only with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added to
protect people from the abuses by the government that would be possible
under the new system.
The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the
government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and
have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government,
which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to
the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the
government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a
representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
The problem is that the phrase "We the People" is not defined in the
Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of "We the People"
and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with
white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who
could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the
Constitution, this narrowed "We the People" down to about 10% of the
population. Those who owned property, including human property, were quite
aware that this was rule by the minority.
So here is the first definition of who is a person in the United States.
Ninety percent of the people - all the immigrants, indentured servants,
slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property
(the poor) - are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights,
but were persons for following the law. They were treated as "subhumans."
By allowing only wealthy, white males to be "persons,"the founding fathers
of the United States codified a class system.
The U.S. Constitution, however, also provided the means to change these
circumstances. The republic was also a representative democracy, with an
elected House of Representatives. That is, the United States held within
its republican form the possibility of democracy. More human beings could
become part of We the People. (And they did. It was not easily won, but
eventually all adult citizens became legal persons.)
Without using the words "slave" or "slavery," the Constitution ensures
that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the
same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the
Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, and war
as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the
foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people - it was
written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection
for people in Section 9, but it is mainly the Bill of Rights that
enumerates and protects the rights of We the People.
Most people believe that the Constitution - specifically, the Bill of
Rights - guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press,
to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say
this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our
constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative
rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for
example, does not say, "All citizens are guaranteed the right to free
speech"; it only says, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the
freedom of speech . . ." The First Amendment just restricts the government
from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not
contested by the people because they had strong bills of rights in their
state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the
federal government. The U.S. Constitution allowed slavery in the whole
United States, for example, but it was each state's constitution that
created free states. Over time, however, the states have lost power to the
federal government because federal laws generally override state laws. The
federal Bill of Rights is the one we depend on protect our freedoms.
If those rights were actually guaranteed in the Constitution, we could,
for example, take the Bill of Rights into the workplace. But we can't.
Anyone who thinks workers have free speech while they're on corporate
property should ask the workers or talk to a union organizer. Because
corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property
rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order
to make a living. Different groups of people - like African Americans and
women - have, one by one, acquired rights and become persons under the law
by getting protection from abuse by the government, usually through
amendments to the Constitution. This is not a guarantee of rights.
Another word that appears nowhere in the Constitution is "corporation,"
and the reason is that the writers of the Constitution had zero interest
in using for-profit corporations to run their new government. In colonial
times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the
purpose of exploiting the so-called "New World" and shoveling wealth back
into Europe. The rich formed joint-stock corporations to distribute the
enormous risk of colonizing the Americas and gave them names like the
Hudson Bay Company, the British East India Company, and the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. Because they were so far from their sovereign - the king - the
agents for these corporations had a lot of autonomy to do their work; they
could pass laws, levy taxes, and even raise armies to manage and control
property and commerce. They were not popular with the colonists.
So the writers of the Constitution left control of corporations to state
legislatures,(10th Amendment), where they would get the closest
supervision by the people. Early corporate charters were very explicit
about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where,
and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they
were prohibited from any part of the political process. Individual
stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of
the corporation, and most charters only lasted for 10 or 15 years. But
most importantly, in order to receive the profit-making privileges the
shareholders sought, their corporations had to benefit the public good,
such a building a road, canal, or bridge. When corporations violated any
of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state
legislatures.
This sounds nothing like the corporations of today, so what happened in
the last two centuries? As time passed and memories of royal oppression
faded, wealthy folks increasingly started eyeing corporations as a
convenient way to shield their personal fortunes. They could sniff the
winds of change and see that their minority rule through property
ownership was under serious threat of being diluted. States gradually
started loosening property requirements for voting, so more and more white
men could participate in the political process. Women were publicly
agitating for the right to vote. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified,
freeing the slaves. Three years later, the 14th Amendment provided
citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and two years after that, the 15th Amendment provided voting
rights to black males. Change was afoot, and so the ruling class
responded.
During and after the Civil War there was a rapid increase in the number
and size of corporations, and this form of business was starting to become
a more important way of holding and protecting property and power.
Increasingly through their corporations, the wealthy started influencing
legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new
laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted
corporate behavior. Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures
increased corporate charter duration while decreasing corporate liability
and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance,
production, and labor.
But the minority in charge were only able to go just so far with this
strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government -
chartered by the state legislatures - they still fell on the government
side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If
minority rule by property holders was going to be accomplished through
corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which
required them to cross the line and become persons under the law. And
their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868.
From then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift
corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to
the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government
abuse.
The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or
naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall "deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor
deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws." The phrase
about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the
due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment,
which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government;
now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way,
either. These are important rights; they're written in a short,
straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over
slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery,
at least for the males.
But that clarity didn't stop the railroad attorneys in the 1870s and '80s.
As mentioned before, those who wanted to maintain minority rule were
losing their grip on power. There was real danger of democracy creeping
into the body politic. Until the Civil War, slavery was essential to
maintaining the entire economic system that kept wealth and power in the
hands of the few - not just in the South, but in the North as well. It was
the legalization of a lie - that one human being can own another. Slavery
was at the core of a whole system of oppression that benefitted the few,
which included the subjugation of women, genocide of the indigenous
population, and exploitation of immigrants and the poor. Now that slavery
could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie,
and they used the 14th Amendment to create it. Because these rights to due
process and equal protection were so valuable, the definition of the word
"person" in the 14th Amendment became the focus of hundreds of legal
battles for the next 20 years. The question was: Who gets to be a person
protected by the 14th Amendment?
The watershed moment came in 1886 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case
called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case itself
was not about corporate personhood, although many before it had been, and
in those cases the Court had ruled that corporations were not persons
under the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara, like many railroad cases, was about
taxes. But before the Court delivered its decision, the following
statement is attributed to Chief Justice Waite: "The court does not wish
to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these
corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." The statement
appeared in the header of the case in the published version, and the Court
made its ruling on other grounds. How this statement appeared in the
header of the case is a matter of some mystery and competing theories, but
because it was later cited as precedent, corporate personhood became the
accepted legal doctrine of the land.
What was it in the 14th Amendment that was so valuable to corporate
lawyers and managers? Why did they pursue it so aggressively? At the time,
as is still true today, corporations were chartered by state governments,
and the 14th Amendment reads "No state shall..." If the word "person" in
the 14th Amendment included corporations, then no state shall deny to
corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed
corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was
enacted to curtail corporations. But because corporations were now persons
under the 14th Amendment, it would be discriminatory not to give them the
same rights under federal laws. With the granting of the 5th Amendment
right to due process, corporate lawyers could challenge, and the Supreme
Court could find grounds to overturn, democratically legislated laws that
originated at the federal as well as state levels.
Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all
Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the
right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the
average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and
the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time
of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of
the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and, a few years
later, Pullman Strike. The people were fighting for democracy. The wealthy
ruling class were working furiously to keep them down.
Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the
"separate but equal" doctrine that legalized racial segregation through
what became known as "Jim Crow" laws. In less than 30 years, African
Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while
corporations had acquired them. And for those still wondering whether the
primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is
about protecting property rather than people, consider this. Of the
hundreds of 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first
50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it
in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its
benefits be extended to corporations. "Equal protection under the law"
turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to
fight for it. Railroad robber barons did; women did not; and African
Americans most certainly did not. In fact, the pattern over more than two
centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment
to the Constitution - a long and difficult, but democratic, process - and
corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government
side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of
Rights through more Supreme Court cases. In 1893 they were assured 5th
Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search
and seizure protection. In 1936 it was freedom of the press and speech. In
1976 the Supreme Court determined that money spent for political purposes
is equal to exercising free speech, and since "corporate persons" have
First Amendment rights, they can basically contribute as much money as
they want to political parties and candidates. Every time "corporate
persons" acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it
gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to
maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time
people have won new rights - like the Civil Rights Act - corporations are
eligible for it, too.
It is important to remember what a corporation is to understand the
implications of corporate personhood for democracy. A corporation is not a
real thing; it's a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can't see or hear or
touch or smell a corporation - it's just an idea that people agree to and
put into writing. Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an
abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have
become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can
change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself - even its
head - and actually function better than before. It can also cut off parts
of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its
own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn't need
fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It
doesn't fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many
different nations. It's not male, female, or even transgendered. Without
giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it's found guilty
of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
Furthermore, even though corporations have acquired many of the rights of
people, they are still chartered by state legislatures, so they're still a
part of government. This means that corporate lawyers can argue either
role for their clients depending on what's most effective in their search
for ever-growing profits. On one day in court, they claim eminent domain
as though corporations are a public entity, and the next day they claim
due process or equal protection as though corporations are a private
entity. What are they - public? Private? Neither? Both? They're whatever
those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority
rule through corporations. As long as superhuman "corporate persons" have
rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no
effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing
corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building
a more democratic society.
When corporations were over on the duties side of the line, the primary
technique for enforcing minority rule was to establish that only a tiny
percentage could qualify as "We the People" - in other words, that most
people were less than human. As different groups of people struggled to
become persons under the law, the corporation crossed over to the rights
side and ultimately became superhuman, still maintaining an artificially
elevated status for a small number of people.
Today the work of corporatists is to take this system global. Having
acquired the ability to govern in the United States, the corporation is
the ideal instrument to gain control of the rest of the world. The
concepts, laws, and techniques perfected by the ruling minority here are
now being forced down the throats of people everywhere. First, a complicit
ruling elite is co-opted, installed, or propped up by the US military and
the government. Then, just as slavery and immigrant status once kept wages
nonexistent or at poverty levels, now sweatshops, maquiladoras, and the
prison-industrial complex provide ultra-cheap labor with little or no
regulation. Just as sharecropping and company store scrip once kept people
trapped in permanently subservient production roles, now the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank's structural adjustment programs keep entire
countries in permanent debt, the world's poorest people forced to feed
interest payments to the world's richest while their own families go
hungry. Just as genocide was waged against native populations that lived
sustainably on the land, now wars are instigated against peoples and
regimes that resist the so-called "free trade" mantra because they have
the audacity to hold their own ideas about governance and resource
distribution. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and divisive
religious, ethnic, ideological, and cultural distrust were all
intentionally instituted to prevent people from making common cause
against the ruling minority, and those systems continue their destructive
work today.
What would change if corporations did not have personhood? The first and
main effect would be removal of a barrier that is preventing democratic
change, just as the abolition of slavery tore down an insurmountable legal
block, allowing the passage of laws required to assure full rights to the
newly freed slaves. After corporate personhood is abolished, new
legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If "corporate
persons" no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could
prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and
contributions to political candidates and parties. If "corporate persons"
were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth
Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA
inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled inspections. If
"corporate persons" weren't protected against discrimination under the
14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into
communities that don't want them.
So what can we do to abolish corporate personhood? Within our current
legal system there are two possibilities: the Supreme Court could change
its mind on corporations having rights in the Constitution, and/or we can
pass an amendment to the Constitution. Either scenario seems daunting; yet
it is even more difficult than that. Every state now has laws and language
in their state constitutions conceding these rights to corporations. So
corporate personhood must be abolished on a state as well as a national
level. The good news is, almost anything we do towards abolishing
corporate personhood helps the issue progress on one of these levels. If a
city passes a non- binding resolution, declaring their area a "Corporate
Personhood Free Zone," that is a step toward passing a constitutional
amendment at their state and eventually at the national level. If a town
passes an ordinance legally denying corporations rights as persons, they
may provoke a crisis of jurisdiction and a court case. We think both paths
should be followed, but believe that an amendment is the more democratic,
and so proper, way to correct this judicial error.
As the rights of human persons in the United States are diminished and
restricted by the USA PATRIOT ACT on the one hand, they are also squeezed
by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights
caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate
person continue to expand. Note that these systems of oppression weren't
established overnight; they were gradually and sometimes surreptitiously
introduced and refined in ways that made them acceptable. At the time of
the Constitution, corporations were widely reviled, but a century later
they were a commonplace business institution, and a century after that
they've become our invisible government. They accomplished this over
decades, changing the law incrementally when most people weren't looking.
Resistance to these oppressions evolved in a similar way. Those who wished
to end slavery, for example, worked for many years collecting information,
refining their analysis, and debating among themselves. They came to
understand the issue as one of human rights and that the whole institution
of slavery was fundamentally wrong. They didn't come up with a Slavery
Regulatory Agency or voluntary codes of conduct for slave owners. They
called themselves Abolitionists - the whole system had to go.
We look at corporate personhood the same way. We see that corporate
personhood was wrongly given - not by We the People, but by nine Supreme
Court judges. We further see that corporate personhood is a bad thing,
because it was the pivotal achievement that allowed an artificial entity
to obtain the rights of people, thus relegating us to less than human
status. And finally, because of the way corporate personhood has enabled
corporations to govern us, we see that it is so bad, we must eradicate it.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate
personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing
slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the
deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a
democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of
eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the
sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in
charge.
-----------------------------------------------
Some notes on the Timeline:
Jane Anne Morris, corporate anthropologist, told me, "The corporate
lawyers have made you a road map. All you need to do is follow the road
backwards." I wanted to see this road more clearly, and so I began to lay
the law cases out in this timeline.
On one side I put all the cases, win or lose, that pertained to
corporations, but limited to firsts on the road toward corporate
personhood. On the other side are some landmarks of peoples rights,
especially those clearly linked to personhood. Much more could be added to
the people's side (for example, all the cases involving Native Americans)
but the corporations side is rather complete concerning corporate
personhood.
As one looks at the timeline, it is apparent that people get their rights
primarily by Constitutional Amendment (the Bill of Rights being the first
10 Amendments) and corporations get rights by Supreme Court rulings. This
relates directly to the issue of democracy. Judge- made law (even though
we may sometimes like their rulings) is not democracy. It may seem that
the timeline stresses the Supreme Court in the role of corporate rights
giver, but we need to also ask: Where was/is the Congress in all of this?
They had the power to change things all along, even Marbury v. Madison.
The Supreme Court has used different theories over time to decide cases
regarding corporate rights. At the beginning of the Court and until 1886,
they regarded corporations as artificial entities. We can see this in
their written opinions. After 1886, corporations were regarded as legal
persons by the Court. In the 1960s there was another shift in reasoning.
The court seems to no longer care whether a corporation is a person or
not. The new reasoning revolves around the question of what are the
rights. What is the history and intent of, say, the First Amendment? What
best serves the First Amendment? The Court's answer, to justify their
corporate speech rulings, seems to be the more speech the better. This
shift in theory is interesting and important as we consider arguing a case
at the Supreme Court.
The timeline contains excerpts of several famous judges' dissents,
beginning in the 1930s. The Court has not been unified on the issue of
corporate personhood rights since. Many important recent rulings were 5 to
4. The judges do not split along traditional right/left lines on this
issue, with Rehnquist writing great dissents, basically saying
corporations are not persons. This is the view of a strict
constructionist- corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution.
The timeline emphasizes corporate powers and rights. But these powers and
rights are to achieve an end-a system that keeps wealth in as few hands as
possible- putting into law Noam Chomsky's rule of capitalism "Privatize
the profits, socialize the costs."
I will let the cases speak for themselves, except for a comment on
Somersett's Case. This English case is included on what is otherwise an
all-American timeline because of its personhood significance. In 1772,
four years before the Revolutionary War, an English Court ruled that
slavery was illegal in England and a slave was free on free soil (England
being free soil.) This caused a uproar in the Colonies as they knew it
would not be long before slavery was outlawed in the English colonies as
well. This ruling convinced the Southern states to join the fight for
independence. So impressed were the founding fathers with Somersett's case
that they wrote the opposite into their new constitution, (Article 4,
sec.2). In 1857, the Supreme Court had a chance to decide virtually the
same case with Dred Scott - is a slave free on free soil - and they
decided no. This infuriated the free states who felt their rights were
being trampled and started the chain of events leading to the Civil War.
The cases involving women and their fight for the 14th Amendment have been
short changed. In sticking with my "first" rule Minor v. Happersett is on
the timeline, but there are other interesting cases worth mention. Susan
B. Anthony went to the polls and cast a vote in 1872, justifying her right
to vote on the 14th Amendment. She was found guilty of illegally voting by
a lower court, and it never went to the Supreme Court. In Bradwell
v.Illinois (1873) a married woman sued under the 14th Amendment to
practice law. She was denied and the opinion of Justice Bradley is a
particularly strong explanation of how a woman's personhood comes from her
husband. In Commonwealth v.Welosky (1931) the Massachusetts Supreme Court
ruled that women cannot sit on juries and explains "to the effect that the
word "person" in construing statutes shall include corporations...it has
also been held not to include women."1931! Women finally get the 14th in
1971 in Reed v. Reed.
There may soon be another case added to the end of the timeline, when the
Supreme Court decides Nike v. Kasky. The question probably will be
narrowed to: Does a corporation have a right to protected political speech
if the issue on which they are speaking has been made political by another
party and they are speaking to defend themselves? The political speech
that Nike corporation seeks is the right to lie, or to tell something
other than truth. If this was truth, they need no protection. The question
of commercial speech and the truth in advertising laws are in danger, as
the slippery slope of what is a political issue and thus protected speech
is hashed out in courts around the country.
The principles of corporate personhood have made their way into
international law. All former English colonies have similar corporate
personhood rights. More research needs to be done on other countries laws,
but it is safe to say the wind is blowing in the direction of greater
corporate rights worldwide. The takings clause of the 5th Amendment first
granted to corporations in 1922 (Penn. Coal Co. v. Mahon) now is the basis
for NAFTA. And the whole concept of the WTO and the other trade
organizations is that corporations can govern. This is the idea behind
corporate constitutional rights.
Many human people helped with this timeline and they are listed at the
end. But I should also acknowledge Carl Mayer, whose article
"Personalizing the Impersonal" (Hastings Law Journal, March 1990) gave me
a big start on the timeline cases.
I will end with another quote from Jane Anne Morris. "Scratch any issue
activists are working on today, and underneath you will find corporate
personhood." This is why we think it is so important to work to Abolish
Corporate Personhood.
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