Question: Do Corporations Have Rights?
Answer: Sort of. Corporations have no independent standing under international human rights law, but recent Supreme Court rulings have affirmed that corporations, as legal entities, have legal rights that appear to be distinct from, albeit contingent upon, the legal rights of its constituent members.
The first Supreme Court case establishing corporate personhood, of a fashion, was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), in which Chief Justice Morrison Waite held that:
That said, it is implicit, albeit seldom explicit, that the Court's affirmation of the concept of corporate personhood is based on the personhood of individual members. That is, a corporation has some of the rights a person has, for practical reasons, because it represents a legal agreement in which people have voluntarily granted it rights--and not because it has somehow met the philosophical definition of personhood. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819):
The first Supreme Court case establishing corporate personhood, of a fashion, was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), in which Chief Justice Morrison Waite held that:
The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.It would be another 39 years before the Court would apply the Bill of Rights via the Fourteenth Amendment to actual human beings, so this early Fourteenth Amendment landmark speaks to a fundamental reality of Supreme Court history: it tends to prioritize the corporate interests, and industrial stability, of the United States over personal rights.
That said, it is implicit, albeit seldom explicit, that the Court's affirmation of the concept of corporate personhood is based on the personhood of individual members. That is, a corporation has some of the rights a person has, for practical reasons, because it represents a legal agreement in which people have voluntarily granted it rights--and not because it has somehow met the philosophical definition of personhood. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819):
A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use.Unless the Supreme Court has fundamentally changed its definition of what a corporation is--and I have found no evidence that it has--it would be accurate to say that a corporation can be treated as a person, for some purposes, because (and only because) of the rights of the human persons who created, and/or administer, it.
