Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s newly installed Supreme Court Justice, has a few words for corporations seeking protection under law.
You’re not people.
During arguments in a recent campaign-finance case
-
that may upend campaign finance law
to allow more spending by corporations,
-
Sotomayor suggested that the core underpinning of protecting corporations’ rights was flawed.
Judges “created corporations as persons;
gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said,
the Wall Street Journal noted Friday.
“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.”
Corporations were first afforded the rights of persons under United States law in the 1800s, allowing them wide protections under federal code.
Development of the law mushroomed as corporations — which were originally chartered by and in single states — began to grow larger and cross state lines.
Eventually, courts ruled that states didn’t have the right to revoke contracts made by the corporations themselves.
They also ruled that states didn’t have the unhindered right to revoke corporate charters.
Corporate personhood emerged
from the 1886 Supreme Court Case,
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
Those seeking to gut campaign finance regulations use this argument when positing that the ability for firms to spend lavishly on political campaigns is tantamount to their right to free speech.
Sotomayor’s comment, while limited in scope, could mark a shift in judicial thought on the bench.Supreme Court Justice Roberts, installed by President George W. Bush, was seen by critics and fans alike as a strong defender of corporate rights.
“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,” Douglas Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, was quoted in the Journal as saying.
On the other side of the fence, the pro-corporate Heritage Foundation said they found Sotomayor’s remark problematic.
“I don’t want to draw too much from one comment,” Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said.
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.”
