The Supreme Court decision

[gwillen]

For those on my flist, if any, who support the Court's decision in /Citizens United v. FEC/, I would be interested to know your answers to the following questions:

Is a toaster a person?

Is a corporation a person?

Can you explain the difference?

What would it mean for a toaster to have a right to free speech?

What does it mean, precisely, for a corporation to have a right to free speech? This is not the same as the free speech rights enjoyed by any of the people involved as individuals -- this, as ruled by the court, is a separate right, belonging to the corporation as an entity in and of itself, completely independent of the rights of any of the individuals involved.

Can you explain the difference?

ETA: Justice Rehnquist's dissent in /First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti/
makes for excellent reading on the subject.

Comments

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I will have to actually read the decision I guess. I had been assuming that the essence of the decision was that corporations were groups of people and to deny them rights was thus unconstitutional. However, you seem to be saying that the decision claims that corporations have rights in and of themselves, a position I find morally abhorrent.

I find the first idea (that corporations have rights as collections of people) to have disturbing consequences, but I am having trouble arguing against it from little-l liberal axioms.

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

I am not sure I precisely understand the distinction you are trying to make. I'm not sure you precisely understand it either? The people in a corporation already have rights, so either you are granting them additional rights (which I find morally abhorrent, and I feel is the line the courts have been taking) or you aren't, in which case, noop. So what is the meaning of your "groups of people" line of thinking?

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

I'm claiming that it *is* a noop, and thus disallowing it is questionable.

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

Well, then let me state for the record my claim that what the courts are doing is _not_ the noop, but the abhorrent thing. :-)

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

Where by "noop" I mean "noop as far as rights are concerned" rather than "noop in terms of consequences".

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

Well, if it has consequences it's not a noop, so I still don't understand what you think would be the case.

[physics-dude.livejournal.com]

I think your claim was addressed above by the statement, "When we talk about preventing CU from showing a political movie, we are in no way preventing the people involved from doing so. All we are doing is preventing them from using the extra advantages given to them as a corporation under state law to do it." Which in the case of tax exemption could certainly be significant. I'm no expert on corporations but I'm sure there are much more insidious things too, like doesn't the corporation being a legally separate entity mean the private citizens can use it to commit libel, and their only consequence is that the corporation is dissolved and they have to form a new one?

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

While I understand that, I'm not convinced that permitting certain associations of people to do something while forbidding other associations of the same people to do this thing makes sense, assuming freedom of assembly and speech.

At some point the question becomes "how do we judge which types of associations have limited rights?" and I don't think the ethical answer is that we can limit the rights of an association which happens to have other rights by virtue of being an association.

Of course, from a pragmatic perspective, I agree with you. I'm willing to restrict the rights of certain associations to protect the rights of individuals. But we don't pay judges to be pragmatists.

[physics-dude.livejournal.com]

I don't think we are on the same page here.

Individuals already have free speech and free association rights. When we talk about incorporation, we are in no way talking about limiting those rights. A corporate entity is given legal privilege (which may include tax exemption, or may just be protection of the individuals by creating a separate entity for the purposes of assets and liabilities). The question is why the individuals should be able to use that privilege to exercise their own personal rights or the rights of the association - they can produce and screen a political movie with their own money, but should they get any tax writeoff for doing so? I don't think they necessarily should.

If you are talking about the different privileges that are assigned to different corporations depending on their stated purpose, I think that is a different issue, and I'm not sure if I think it's ethical or not. But if we took away *all* corporate privileges, people still have free speech and association rights.

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, this assumes I believe in things like "rights" and "associations," which I'm willing to pretend to for the purpose of discussion, and because the law does believe in such things, and we are discussing the correctness of the judgment, not its morality. Or at least I am.