Corporations ARE people… but it doesn’t matter

Greetings,

Until 2009, the year before Citizens United v. FEC, groups like companies, churches, and nations had always been treated as people for the purposes of contracts, lawsuits, etc. They had some rights, but were unquestionably not people. 2010’s Supreme Court decision re-defined corporations as people and gave them the same free speech rights, but notably not the same responsibilities or obligations. What could possibly go wrong?

The law recognizes three categories of ‘person’. ‘Natural person’ is easy; it’s you and I in all our meat-puppet glory. A ‘moral person’ is harder to spot. They’re individual entities that aren’t natural persons, but might well deserve the same rights. Androids, artificial intelligence, or space aliens are typical examples of moral people but they aren’t our concern here. The third category of ‘legal person’ (or ‘judicial person’) may be the most surprising.

“[In] common speech, ‘person’ is often used as meaning a human being, but the technical legal meaning of a ‘person’ is a ‘subject of legal rights and duties’. In particular it means an individual that can “sue, be sued, or enter into contracts”. Interestingly, this definition excludes some ‘natural people’ like handicapped people, comatose people, or infants, who aren’t ‘legal persons’ because they aren’t competent to form contracts! But regardless of who qualifies as a ‘legal person’, there’s no automatic suite of rights that comes with that personhood. Specific rights and duties of legal persons are defined by law.

Things started going bad in 2010 with Citizens United v FEC. Despite the verbiage used by media and common folks (myself among them), the SCOTUS did NOT decide corporations were people! They were already ‘legal persons’ under the law. No, what SCOTUS decreed, against centuries of legal precedent, was that corporate ‘persons’ had the same free speech rights as natural persons. They started getting worse in 2014’s Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, when SCOTUS granted religious freedom to corporate ‘persons’ incapable of holding religious views, but who were perfectly willing and able to inflict those religious views on natural people.

Now jump to today, 2023, in Seaford, Delaware, which just voted unanimously to allow artificial entities to vote in municipal elections. Seaford’s not alone- at least 12 municipalities already allow participation by artificial entities such as corporations, trusts and LLCs. Aside from fraud possibilities like the property manager with several LLCs who voted 31 times the same election, in Delaware there are about 1.5 million registered businesses and only 980,000 humans. In Delaware our Corporate Overlords already outnumber us, and now they can vote.

When we ask “is this a person”, we typically don’t mean “does it fit the legal definition”. We’re usually wondering whether it has the same rights as we do. Take away the ambiguous term ‘person’… businesses, governments, religions, and other groups are individual entities for the purposes of law, but not humans. They’re exclusively the tools and conveniences of human beings, and we cripple actual humans when we treat them otherwise.

Non-human entities might deserve some rights and protections even if they don’t get the full suite of human rights. What about animal rights? Rights for artificial intelligence? Rights of future generations? Rights of nature or the Earth itself? Humans are considering these and other questions right now, and we’ll be grappling with the consequences for centuries to come. We’ve been tragically bad at defining humanity in the past and we’ll have many opportunities to do better, or worse, in the future. Maybe understanding the difference between a ‘person’ and a ‘human’ doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s a necessary place to start.

Make a great day,