[eindiran]

From the Wikipedia page: "Although the decision does not address "corporate personhood," a long-established judicial and constitutional concept, much attention has focused on that issue."[0]

"How should one interpret [the case] then?" Recognize that Citizen's United is _not_ about corporate personhood, and actually read what the case was about. The number of times I've heard people making snarky remarks about Citizen's United without having read anything about the case is amazing.

In the US, corporate personhood is about:

(1) Corporations having equal protection under the law as persons (ie the 14th amendment applies to corporations).

(2) Coporations having the same rights as persons to draft and enforce contracts, making them "legal entities". This is related to (3).

(3) "Person" as a concept applies to associations of people rather than just individuals; associations of individuals includes corporations. See here: [1]

None of these things were decided in Citizen's United and further, it had no legal bearing on the case law surrounding these things.

Instead Citizen's United was about whether a particular law violated the 1st Amendment. Specifically the law prohibited corporations from releasing media 60 days before an election if it could impact the results of that election by reaching 50,000 or more people in the electorate. But the 1st Amendment makes no distinction between e.g. newspaper companies and other corporations, so the majority opinion was that this law and other laws that limit speech of associations of people infringe on the 1st Amendment.

From the opinion: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

[geofft]

That's all well and good, but 'frequentnapper did not actually say anything about Citizens United in the first place.

If corporations are people, we should jail them. If corporations aren't people, why do they have legal rights independent of the individual, jailable people who constitute them?

[Gibbon1]

Seriously corporations have the right to pay fines with other peoples money instead of being jailed or executed. People of flesh and blood don't have those rights.

Compare Walmart committing bribery to me attempting to bribe my way out of speeding ticket.

[will_brown]

>Compare Walmart committing bribery to me attempting to bribe my way out of speeding ticket.

But that is how the ticket industry works...you get the ticket, hire a lawyer, the lawyer “negotiates” a deal to plead no contest in exchange for no points and a lower $ penalty or at your option take traffic school ( a local private company that no doubt “bribes” its way in to those chushy exclusive county government contracts) and the court will dismiss your ticket like it never happened.

[Gibbon1]

Read harder. You try to bribe a cop, you get arrested and you go to jail. If you have a buttload of money you can avoid jail. If not, you serve time. Then you are branded a criminal, forever.

Unlike Walmart which gets to stay a corporation in good standing. And it's executives who suffer no personal harm.

[will_brown]

Read harder? Don’t resort to ad hominem attacks because you don’t know or understand the law.

Walmart allegedly bribed foreign officials they didn’t try to bribe the “cops” for bringing the bribery charges. Although you can’t distinguish the legal difference, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Executives do go to jail quite regularly for bribery and companies can and are judicially dissolved also.

For example I was in Las Vegas during the Shot Show when the FBI rolled right into the convention center and arrested executives/VPs of Smith and Wesson for bribing an undercover FBI agent, posing as a African delegate, for a large government contract.

Or how about the VW executives arrested (and convicted) for the emissions scandal?

Or the drug company Executives and CEO recently charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and defraud the US?

[pmiller2]

Except corporations don’t have equal protection under law. They have more protection than individuals because they’re a device for absolving individuals of personal liability. The only penalty we seem to want to subject them to for any kind of wrongdoing is a fine, which is often not enough to deter the activity that caused them to receive said fine.

We need to make fines meaningful, start holding C-level execs personally responsible in some cases, and bring back the only penalty that matters to an immortal and amoral legal entity: the death penalty, via revocation of the corporate charter. Only then will we see the behavior of corporations start to change.

[Nasrudith]

Personally I suspect the corporate death penalty will be even more worthless than the actual one for deterrence. The corporate shield isn't supposed to apply to criminal conduct for participants in the first place.

Any investor should already treat them as disposable sources of revenue so crooked business actors would do the same. It would be like sentencing the gun to the death penalty and letting the robber go free. Instead pursue all those with actual power and liability who don't do the right thing and leave those who did alone as possible (it shouldn't stop enforcement) or reward them.

Otherwise they will be encouraged to "3S" (shoot, shovel, and shut up) their problems instead of cooperating or reporting.

[brianpgordon]

OK, but the whole argument rests entirely on corporate personhood. Without it, the 1st amendment isn't even in play.

[rayiner]

You’ve got it backward. It was the law that tried to use corporate personhood to subvert the first amendment. What Citizens United said is that you can’t deny groups of people their first amendment rights just because they’re acting through a corporation.