This concept is not new. In ancient Roman law, a corporation was considered a legal person: a single, non-human entity that legally represented a group of many people [source: Sherman]. The idea makes sense; After all, a business consists of financial contributions from people. Somewhat counterintuitively, U.S. companies today enjoy the same rights as U.S. citizens. Both have the right to freedom of expression and religion, for example. How exactly were corporations understood as “persons” with the most basic constitutional rights? The answer can be found in a bizarre – even absurd – series of lawsuits more than 130 years ago involving a lawyer who lied to the Supreme Court, an ethically challenged judicial system, and one of the most powerful corporations of the time. Other examples of constitutionally deriving business rights abound. The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of persons to be free from improper search and seizure of their person, home, paper, and personal belongings.” The Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, provides that “no state. to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the same protection of the law.
If corporations are not protected by these rights, as progressives claim they are not humane, it would be legal to search the offices of a company or nonprofit, for example, without a warrant. It would also mean that states could adopt laws that discriminate against businesses based on the owner`s currently protected race, religion, gender or other currently protected characteristic. But when corporations are governments – groups of people – whose rights are protected because they are rights-bearing components, they rarely embody the standards we expect from other governments in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, today`s corporate governments often resemble the governments of a bygone era. Americans have long rejected the idea that only people who own property can vote for representatives – but most business enterprises operate on the principle of “one share, one vote”.42×42. See Holger Spamann, Corporations § 2.1, p. 29 (2017); cf. Violence and Democracy, 100 The Outlook 352, 352-53 (1912) (“We call our government democratic: and so it is. But if we turn to industry processes.
Power is exercised by an oligarchy that controls capital. Americans have also rejected the idea that women, people of color, and other groups who contribute to the country`s well-being should be denied the right to vote — yet few companies allow workers, consumers, or even shareholders to vote on the political causes their companies will support.43×43. The Lawrence Strike: A Review, 100 The Outlook 531, 536 (1912) In light of Justice Sotomayor`s recent comments at the hearing in Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission, it may be useful to consider the state of the corporation as a separate legal entity. 9. In September 2009, Justice Sonia Sotomayor remarked in her question to Mr. Abrams: However, no one would argue that the rights enshrined in these amendments are held solely by individuals to the exclusion of corporations – or that they should be. This would mean not only a misinterpretation of the Constitution, but also expose private cooperation by individuals to potential tyranny. Observers who compared the wealth of Lawrence`s corporations to the poverty and disenfranchisement of strikers called for increasingly democratic corporate societies. “We call our government democratic; And so it`s essentially “155×155. Editorial, Violence and Democracy, 100 The Outlook 352, 352 (1912). wrote the editorial board of The Outlook, which included former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.156×156.
William N. Tilchin, Reveal Post-Presidential Snapshots: Theodore Roosevelt in the Outlook, March-July 1909, 34 Theodore Roosevelt Ass`n J. 31, 31 (2013). “But if we turn to the processes of industry” and “see as many trembling men without coats as can be seen in the Lawrence cloth factory,” 157×157. Violence and Democracy, op. cit. note 155, p. 352. The editors wrote that it had become clear that corporations were “wielding power through an oligarchy.” 158×158.
Id., p. 353. Instead, the country must “find a way to replace the industrial oligarchy with a dominant industrial democracy.” 159×159. Although borrowing a term from industrial workers, the publishers defined industrial democracy as a system of corporate governance “in which workers, together with employers and consumers, must participate in determining the conditions of their work and the share to which they should be entitled in the products of their labor.” 160×160.