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Comment by jmye | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what you think "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of [...] the press" means, in this case. Did you just not know what the actual text is, or ... ?

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You see the reading “the press” as meaning some organization of people. You take it for granted that the freedom of the press applies to a business entity like the NYT and also to an individual blogger or any other person creating a publication.

The idea that people can come together to form cooperative groups and can use those to exercise rights through the idea of personhood is such a normal and legally settled idea.

The New York Times (the corporation, as a legal person) has the right to freedom of the press, not just individual humans who work there. This is good, because it means the entire institution is protected. Not only is the government forbidden from arresting the humans for operating the printing press, it’s also forbidden from sanctioning the corporation for hiring humans to operate the press. In other words, freedom of the press applies to corporations (eg. the Times) as well as human persons. I think you and the commenter you responded to both agree on the fundamental claim here, although you might disagree about the semantics of whether “corporate personhood” is a good way of describing this concept.

Absolutely insane take.

Can you be more specific? What would it mean for the New York Times (the corporation) not to be protected by the first amendment? The government can sue the New York Times Company for what it prints as long as the government doesn’t prosecute the humans who work there?

The existence of corporate personhood has been settled law in the United States for over a hundred years, and all nine current Supreme Court justices agree with it. There’s controversy on exactly where it applies, with cases defining the boundaries of what rights corporate persons have. I don’t think the example I’m giving here is likely to be contentious.

Corporate personhood isn't required for the first amendment to apply to the nytimes.

The NYTimes is a corporation. Corporate personhood is the term of art that we use when the legal person a right applies to is a corporation.

"We"

Ok, there’s the terminology used by the legal community (including all nine justices on the Supreme Court) and then there’s people who dislike the terminology because they saw a misleading speech about the issue on the Daily Show.

I think you’re generally correct about the function (“the press” is both Joe/Jill Journalist and the NYT), but I think you’re giving GP’s comment a much better reading than I can.

A restriction on government (as the First Amendment language is phrased) is not the same thing as an individual right. There are plenty of cases where a restriction is in the law, but only a very limited set of entities has standing to sue to enforce it. You could imagine such a case with regard to the First Amendment if we didn't have the corporate personhood doctrine.

I have no idea what that has to do with my comment or the one I responded to. The freedom of the press is guaranteed by the first amendment. The NYT doesn’t suddenly lose “rights to it” if it’s not seen as a person.

“Corporate personhood” is irrelevant, in this comment chain, and is just a way to take a swipe at an ostensibly left-leaning org in order to turn this into a team sport.

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