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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

Corporations don’t have speech interests.

The majority’s opinion in Citizens United is premised upon the assertion that they do.

Sure they do. Corporations are owned by people, and those people have speech interests. If corporations didn’t have the right to free speech then a group of people campaigning for a politics cause would suddenly lose their right to free speech if they formed a corporation to simplify the activities, such as the joint handling of money or purchasing of ads.

Corporations also get a lot of benefits that individuals or unstructured associations don't - mainly things like liability protection - so it's not like it would be unreasonable to have corresponding limitations on what they are allowed to do.

And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights?

(and that's before the other issues with Citizen's United as a case, regardless of the decision as people usually remember it, but I'm starting to go off a bit..)

> And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights?

That's an interesting point. Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges.

> Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges

I think the only reason this isn't controversial is because people don't think about it. The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it. Supposedly our country was meant to separate church and state, but it's obvious it was such a new concept that many of the ideas were stolen from the mores of the conventional religions of the time.

I mean, why is marriage a legal thing at all? Why is the government involved? It made sense when there was a dowry involved, but today? Nobody cares until they realize what a fucking nightmare getting divorced is, and the number of conditions and loopholes is asinine. It's almost like the lawyers invented it, because divorce lawyers make an insane amount of money on the suffering of others (they are heavily incentivized to push for people to be combative, because they make more money that way - and it's easy to rile people up when custody of children is involved).

This is obviously a bit of a rant that went in a weird direction but whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8

> The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it.

You might be interested in the concept of the relationship escalator, then.

https://solopoly.net/2012/11/29/riding-the-relationship-esca...

(Disclaimer: I'm not poly, but I really like how poly folk interrogate relationship norms. Don't be scared off by the poly blog!)

No. The owners have speech interests because they are people. The corporation itself does not.

Don't candidates in political campaigns have some limits imposed by law? Amounts you're allowed to spend and so on. Their campaign is a corporation if I'm not mistaken

In a vacuum, it does not seem to follow from the 1st amendment that forming a corporation for financial expedience should also be protected speech. You don't lose speech by forming a new thing without speech if you retain your rights as an individual.

> a group of people campaigning for a politics cause would suddenly lose their right to free speech if they formed a corporation to simplify the activities

This doesn't make any sense. Every person in the group retains their free speech rights and can exercise them however they want, it's only the non-human "person" entity in the form of the corporation that would be limited.

"Corporations" here typically being not for profit corporations such as unions or public advocacy groups (including the eponymous "Citizens United").

We don’t face a binary choice between granting all money-earning organizations speech rights and depriving all public interest non profits of speech rights because we have a legislative process.

Sure, and Congress could potentially draft such legislation, which could be constitutional depending on the specifics, unlike the provisions in the McCain-Feingold act.

The Constitution is legislation.

If a state passed a law that corporations may not put a kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional?

(Certainly it's not interfering with the corporation's freedom of religion interests, is it? Corporations don't practice religion!)

The problem here is that there's no simple or intuitive description of the solution we want besides "The right to free speech does not extend to the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering." (And that should apply to individuals just the same as corporations.) I'd wholeheartedly agree with that, but it needs a constitutional amendment - there isn't another way out.

> If a state passed a law that corporations may not put a kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional?

No, but not for the company, but for the harm that would cause harm to practitioners of their respective religions.

But the companies are under no obligation to include this information. If they are legally forbidden from including it, how does it become a violation of my rights as a practitioner when it is not a violation for them to just not bother?

Though maybe bringing in religion makes this distracting... Do you think a state government may permissibly make a law banning the sale of transgender flags? You're still free to make your own or even sell them as individuals.

Or maybe more directly to Citizen's United - can the government ban all non-indie films that negatively depict the military? Individuals have a free speech right to make whatever films they want, but do corporations?

This is the basic problem with the government’s case in Citizens United. There is no real limiting principle to the law; the government actually prosecuted a dinky little non-profit, not a giant corporation, making for a fantastic test case; and the government admitted at oral argument before the Supreme Court that there was no limiting principle to its theory of the first amendment that would keep the government from banning books.

> kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional

... no? It would be a law more or less targeting a particular religion. That's against both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. Unless I'm missing something here?

> (Certainly it's not interfering with the corporation's freedom of religion interests, is it? Corporations don't practice religion!)

Serious question: Why can't they? They're groups of people after all. (I'm not sure how that would fit with protected classes under federal employment law though. If a company openly supports a particular religion is that potentially a form of discrimination?)

That's the point of the analogy. Rights like freedom of religion and freedom of speech must extend to corporations as well.

I tend to agree, but I think (perhaps mistakenly) that OP was trying to illustrate via analogy that it's more complicated than that. I wasn't able to see the point being made with the analogy though (hence my reply).

I'd see it as infringing on the religious shopper's rights rather than the corporations though. That makes it towards impossible to practice your religion

Preliminarily, I do think such a law would be constitutional. However, you haven’t said why you think it wouldn’t be, so I’m not sure what exactly you’re inviting me to argue.

I think it wouldn't be constitutional on the same grounds as Citizens United, namely, it would be a violation of the right to free speech. If I have a constitutional right as an individual to label things kosher or halal, why would I lose that right if I go into business with some friends? (I'm assuming I have this right as an individual, right?)

I think it is a consistent view that I do lose that right when I incorporate to be clear, and you could probably design a coherent society on that model - I just don't totally follow why / what the constitutional grounds are.

YOU don't lose that right, but the corporation is never given that right

What's the difference, in practice? Not only can the corporation fire me for putting such a label on the food, they must, if such a law exists - if they don't, they're liable.

So, let's say I'm a baker selling, I dunno, kosher cookies. I can sell them to my friends and say, "By the way, these are kosher!" They're popular with my friends, and so I decide to make a business out of it. As soon as I do that, the business is never given the right of free speech, and the business is now given an obligation to prevent me-the-individual from saying certain things in the course of my job duties. That is, if I continue saying the same thing I said yesterday, the government can shut down my business.

You'd say that this is constitutional?

Can corporations put “kosher” markings on food that is not kosher? Isn’t that already a limit on free speech?

I think the answer is that if it's misleading/deceptive they can't under trade practices laws, and yes, I'd certainly call that a restriction on free speech, but it's one that applies equally to individuals and corporations.

It'd be trademark infringement. the circle K thing is a trademark that a private Kosher organization allows companies to put on certified foods after they're satisfied with the inspection (as far as I recall.)

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