I have been in Arkansas attending to a family emergency, and while down there I joined (by cell phone) Professor Bob Burns, South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson, and host Paul Guggenheimer on Dakota Midday. The topic was the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. This is obviously a hot topic here and elsewhere. You can use the link above to listen to the show. I recommend it, for Professor Burns and Secretary Nelson, at least, had a lot of interesting things to say about the case.
While I was away, Professor David Newquist responded to my recent post on the topic of corporate personhood. Or at least I think he was responding to me. For reasons he has never bothered to explain, he usually refuses to identify or link to the people he takes issue with. My post was a critical response to an earlier post of his on the same topic.
Here is the thread, as I understand it: Professor Newquist wrote this in the earlier post:
To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language.
I pointed out that to speak of a corporation as a person was in fact a well established convention in English and I demonstrated it by quoting the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries.
In his recent post, Professor Newquist explains that part of his original post was lost due to a computer error. If only we had the missing passage, we would see that he was not in error. There is a bit of "the dog ate my homework" in that, but it concedes my point. "Corporate personhood" is not, as he originally argued, an Orwellian distortion of language; it is common English usage.
Professor Newquist goes on to make a serious and credible argument. As I understand it, he agrees that corporations are artificial persons bearing rights and duties, as the dictionaries say. Corporations are not, however, natural persons, and so do not enjoy the inalienable rights of the latter. He accuses the Supreme Court of confusing the two concepts of personhood by declaring that corporations enjoy the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
The literature of America deals extensively with the idea that inalienable rights accrue to natural persons but not to artificial ones.
The issue with the Supreme Court decision is that the majority opinion does not adhere to that distinction of what is considered an authentic person and equates corporations with natural persons in defining that matter of rights.
While I am not so sure that that first line can be backed up with documents (he offers no citation) I certainly agree with Professor Newquist's distinction. I would add that the rights and duties are derivative of the rights and duties of the persons who form a corporation.
I am not convinced, however, that the distinction establishes Professor Newquist's point. The Founders surely considered the right to own and acquire property as an inalienable right of natural persons. Corporations have the right to own and acquire property under law. Government cannot take such property without due process.
The Court found that corporate bodies likewise enjoy freedom of speech. When a group of citizens gets together, pools their resources, and issues a statement of their collective opinion, is that not protected by the freedoms of speech and of the press? The Court thinks so, and I agree. Professor Newquist is certainly entitled to disagree, but he has hardly demonstrated that the Court is guilty of "engaging in semantic shysterism in defining corporations as persons in the same sense that individual humans are."
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