- #THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW APPLIES TO CORPORATIONS FULL#
- #THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW APPLIES TO CORPORATIONS FREE#
As I demonstrate in my book, corporate lawyers have a long history of arguing for expanded notions of corporate personhood in America. In a nutshell, in my book I argue that the Supreme Court is allowing for vastly expanded corporate rights, while at the same time the same Court is excusing corporations from a growing list of responsibilities. Supreme Court jurisprudence surrounding corporations in my book Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State.
Corporations do not have coequal constitutional rights as living, breathing human citizens, but they are making claims on more rights that, until relatively recently, were only asserted by real people. But now counter-majoritarian courts are taking the lead in shoehorning corporations into roles that previously only American citizens occupied.
#THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW APPLIES TO CORPORATIONS FULL#
Through Article V amendments to the Constitution, the American people decided that individuals who had long been excluded from being considered part of “we the people,” like African Americans and women, were, in fact, full members of the body politic. (For a longer analysis of the Scott decision, see Crooms-Robinson’s article that begins on page 2.)
Scott) for a piece of property, the blunder in Citizens United was mistaking a piece of property (a corporation) for a person. If the logical flaw in Dred Scott was mistaking a person (Mr. FEC that corporations have First Amendment political rights to buy ads in all American elections. Flash forward to 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Thus, Douglass reasoned “we the people” included African Americans as well.Ĭourts continue to this day to wrestle with the basic question of who or what counts as a person with protectable rights. “We, the people”-not we, the white people-not we, the citizens, or the legal voters-not we, the privileged class, and excluding all other classes but we, the people not we, the horses and cattle, but we the people-the men and women, the human inhabitants of the United States. In response to Dred Scott, ex-slave Frederick Douglass gave a speech before the American Anti-Slavery Society. This racist conclusion of the Supreme Court fencing out African Americans from counting as “persons” was controversial in its day. The Court concluded that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court concluded that African Americans were not included in “we the people” in the preamble of the U.S. He was property to be bought, sold, and inherited, and the only rights Chief Justice Taney would protect were the property rights of his owner.
#THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW APPLIES TO CORPORATIONS FREE#
Taney had a case before him in 1857 where a man was trying to claim his status as a free man because he had long lived in a free territory of the United States. One word that is heavily contested in the American legal context is “person”-and by extension-who counts as a member of “we the people.” For instance, Chief Justice Roger B. The plain meaning of words can get mangled in the hands of a clever lawyer.
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