[jabbywocker]

It was a major expansion, based solely on the reuse of the term. It’s why I used it as an example.

The main arguments boils down to that since corporations are people and have free speech, and that a natural persons financial activity is considered protected speech, that a corporate person should have the same freedom as there should be no distinctions about the rights afforded to a person.

The entire argument would have been moot if we used distinct terminology

[thfuran]

There were then and still are now constitutional rights afforded to natural persons but not juridical persons. There is not some inability to distinguish the two. Look at the ruling that Citizens United overturned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_v._Michigan_Chamber_of_.... It was very clear that it's fine (and necessary) to restrict corporations in some ways precisely because they are not people.

Perhaps the argument of Citizens United wouldn't have been made if we instead used the terms "Human Shmerg" and "Legal Shmerg", but exactly the same argument could apply to shmergness as to personhood when discussing the rights afforded to shmergs of one kind or another, and the conservatives in the US really want to deregulate everything.

[jabbywocker]

Thats exactly my point, you do not have to use the exact same term for both types. You could literally just use “person” and “corporation” as wholly distinct terms with overlapping rights afforded to each and avoid the edge case semantic arguments that create legal situations that the majority takes issue with.

[MaxfordAndSons]

I'd venture to guess that whatever legal logic resulted in the SC deciding that corporations should have the same right to free speech as individuals presumably doesn't hinge on any semantic blurriness between different subsets of "persons", and even if they didn't use overlapping terms it would still have ruled thus.

That said, it certainly is nice free marketing for our corporate overlords.