Posted by Jonathan Adler:
Sotomayor & Corporate Rights:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_13-2009_09_19.shtml#1253157714
Should the law treat corporations as legal persons? The newest justice
may think not -- or at least that's the impression some have drawn
from a comment she made at the Citizens United oral argument last
week. [1]From the WSJ:
During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority
conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First
Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on
corporate political spending should be overruled.
But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all
wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th
century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights
flesh-and-blood people have.
Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations
as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that
was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state
law with human characteristics." . . .
Justice Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg. "A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator
with inalienable rights," Justice Ginsburg said, evoking the
Declaration of Independence.
Sotomayor's remark cheered some, but not others.
"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly
large influence on policy in the United States have to feel
reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas
Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability
Center.
"I don't want to draw too much from one comment," says Todd
Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at
the conservative Heritage Foundation. But it "doesn't give me a lot
of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of
rights that it should be afforded."
References
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125314088285517643.html
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