Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

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The recent SCOTUS decision was indeed correct if precedent is to be taken into account. However, I think 100 years of bad legal precedent and the status quo has blinded you (and the Supreme Court, for that matter) towards the real issue. Corporate personhood might be a red herring on the actual issue of campaign finance reform, but it is one of the most important issues facing our civilization and this Supreme Court decision is drawing needed attention to the underlying issue.

It is a legal accident that corporate personhood was established in the first place. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2469/how-can-a-corp...

While corporations are not flesh and blood people, we as humans can certainly define intangible entities into existence. They are still made up of people, but that does not diminish the realness of an entity created only by our civilization's power of words and ideas.

I think people should have rights; not inanimate entities. I think corporate personhood is one of the most egregious mistakes ever committed by humanity as it has allowed living people to no longer be accountable for their crimes. I also think it's too late to fix -- if the USA eliminated corporate personhood, the stock market would crash and there would be a mass exodus of corporations to more business friendly countries.

It's not a hopeless situation though; there will continue to be restrictions on the rights of corporations. I'm optimistic that Congress is going to overturn this most recent Supreme Court decision.

We could be doing more. As an important first step, I suggest a drastically increased use of the corporate death penalty, starting with multiple-time convicted felon (and statistical mass-murderer) Pfizer. If Pfizer was a flesh and blood person, it would be spending a very long time in prison. Instead, it has only paid some of the largest criminal settlements in DoJ history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer

Corporate personhood goes back to the beginnings of the English common law and was not the product of a mere "legal accident" by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Blackstone's Commentaries (11th edition, 1791), volume 1, p. 467 (ch. 18, "Of Corporations"):

"We have hitherto considered persons in their natural capacities, and have treated of their rights and duties. But, as all personal rights die with the person; and, as the necessary forms of investing a series of individuals, one after another, with the same identical rights, would be very inconvenient, if not impracticable; it has been found necessary, when it is for the advantage of the public to have any particular rights kept on foot and continued, to constitute artificial persons, who may maintain a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality.

These artificial persons are called bodies politic, bodies corporate, . . . or corporations: of which there is a great variety subsisting, for the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce; in order to preserve entire and for ever those rights and immunities, which, if they were granted only to those individuals of which the body corporate is composed, would upon their death be utterly lost and extinct." (my emphasis)

I cite Blackstone, no small figure in either legal history or the law undergirding the U.S. constitution, to emphasize that he regarded it as central to the idea of what constitutes a corporation that it was to be treated as a legal "person." This is found in my 1791 edition of this work.

Thus, this doctrine is hardly new or radical and certainly no one felt the need to mock it over the 200+ years during which it has been in effect by suggesting that a corporation exercise rights of a citizen by running for office.

All that said, I understand your point about its being claimed that this doctrine was accidentally incorporated into the Court's constitutional analysis but the core doctrine runs much, much deeper than the particular case cited in your linked article and (as reflected in the Blackstone quote) is and always has been fundamental to understanding the legal idea of a corporation.

I agree with you about the body of history here. The doctrine is in no ways new or radical; I still think it's a bad idea, and it's gotten a lot easier to incorporate since the days of the East India Company when you needed a Royal Charter to incorporate.

"I think corporate personhood is one of the most egregious mistakes ever committed by humanity"

I think you need to look more deeply into the history of human mistakes.

I'm not sure how to further answer you and similarly-concerned people in the larger sense, though. Of all the legal and political problems in the US, I consider the issue of corporate personhood to be deeply trivial, and I'm dismayed and angered that people would restrict the free speech of actual human beings out of fear of a legal fiction.

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