Sanders Files Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision

[MFrohike]

73. I really don't think you understood what I said

Whatever rights non-human entities have are derived from their human members (ownership, board, etc.). The reason a corporation can appear as itself in court is because it's less of a burden on the human who make it up. That's the same reason they can exercise other rights. It's not something intrinsic to the non-human entity. In essence, the rights they can exercise are derived from the humans who actually possess those rights.

It seems like you want to link constitutional rights for non-human entities, i.e. legal fictions, to the natural rights theory. That's, uh, quite a stretch. The essence of the natural rights theory is that constitution guarantees pre-existing rights. We'll leave aside the absurdity of a guarantee for a pre-existing right because it wouldn't help the discussion. I don't get how you get past the problem that legal fictions require a legal regime to exist. These fictions exist because the law allows them to exist. If their entire existence is dependent upon the legal regime that made them possible, then how do they have a pre-existing claim to any rights at all?

Ultimately, no, I don't think non-human entities have rights independent of the humans who comprise them. I think it's just a silly claim. I think whoever makes such an argument is badly misguided. I also think anyone who makes such an argument is simply ignorant of how law actually works in America. This idea of a legal fiction having independent rights enshrines arrangements that are conducive to conducting business into a principle of stupidity. Honestly, you incorporate in some fashion to gain limited liability, preferential tax treatment, or both. You don't do it because of free association. It's simply ignorant to claim otherwise.

As for unions, which I haven't mentioned until now, they have a similar ability to corporations to exercise rights. This was explicitly done to make it more convenient for their members to exercise their rights collectively. Do not confuse that for some grand principle derived from the constitution because that is not true at all. You can't understand the rights labor possesses when organized unless you actually know the legal means that were used against labor prior to the 1930s. The forms that exist have been chosen for either practical or political reasons and sometimes both.

Your first amendment argument is bizarre. Not the analysis of restriction vs. grant, which not something I ever mentioned, but the application to a non-human entity. If the essentials of the Bill of Rights apply to a legal fiction, what about the right to vote? The right to bear arms? What about the latent Equal Protection problem with such an approach? If you don't understand what I mean, consider limited liability and preferential tax treatment. If we are to actually have corporate citizens, how can they possess rights denied to natural born persons, whose existence is not entirely dependent upon law? Further, what of the laws that enable such entities? Are they now enshrined permanently? Are they now completely immune from revision or even repeal? Would an attempt to repeal the law allowing the corporate form by a state legislature necessarily be required to provide due process? How would you reconcile the need to provide due process with separation of powers? After all, the states tend to follow the federal model when it comes to the form of the government.

You may think these questions are absurd, but, if you do, you're naive in the extreme. Extend constitutional protections to non-human entities in themselves, not through their humans, and you will see thousands of lawsuits asking just those questions. So, unless you have answers to those questions, and the rest that will derive from them, then maybe the argument that a corporation possesses the same constitutional rights as a natural person isn't a good argument to make.