
'Corporations Are People' Is Built on a 19th-Century Lie - colinprince
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/?single_page=true
======
Digory
The Atlantic should be ashamed of this headline.

Winkler's essay in the Saturday WSJ on this same topic says this: "Corporate
personhood is a foundational principle of business law. In 1757, Blackstone in
his influential 'Commentaries on the Law of England' wrote that corporations
were 'artificial persons.' Open any corporate law casebook and one of the
first lessons will be that corporations are legal persons." [0]

So, "Corporations are People" isn't a new idea, is much older than the 19th
Century, and Winkler himself says otherwise.

[0][https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-rights-should-
corporations...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-rights-should-corporations-
have-1519919444)

~~~
dragonwriter
Legal corporate personhood is _exactly_ the original differentiating factor of
the corporate form vs. other business structures (which basically consisted of
sole proprietorships and general partnerships at the time, most other forms
are newer inventions than the corporation.)

That said, _Constitutional_ corporate personhood is a distinct thing; it is
quite possible for legal corporate personhood to be observed without the
protections granted to “the people” or “persons” in the Constitution being
extended to private corporations (they generally are not extended to
juridical/artificial persons which are _not_ private corporations, such as
public bodies, despite those bodies also being legal persons.)

The contentious issue about “corporate personhood” is about Constitutional,
rather than juridical, corporate personhood. So while you (and the WSJ article
you cite) are correct about legal corporate personhood, that's also a bit of a
non-sequitur and equivocation in the discussion at hand. (Though it would help
if articles like the Atlantic one would expressly identify Constitutional
personhood as the issue and contrast it with juridical personhood, so as to
clarify the problem domain and forestall this kind of distraction.)

------
vadimberman
> Somewhat unintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same
> rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom
> of speech and the freedom of religion.

I keep hearing that but what does it even mean?

Corporations don't have religious beliefs, people do. Can the corporation be
Muslim and have 100% Mormon employees?

The only controversial bit I could locate in a different source was the
corporate political spending:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood)
\- but there is a bajillion plus loopholes to do that without the need to
resort to legal fiction.

~~~
trisimix
Yeah companies can internally praise certain religions over others. They can’t
discriminate but they do anyways.

~~~
vadimberman
It's not the companies, it's their owners. The simple test is, if the company
management changes to someone of a different faith, will they praise the same
religious belief? The answer is clearly no, as no one in their right mind puts
religion in the articles of incorporation, probably not even in Pakistan or
Saudi Arabia.

