| > Why can't both of those be true? I don't see any contradiction between them. "Corporations aren't people" and "corporations are singular entities unto themselves capable of exercising independent agency" are direct contradictions. > The law doesn't seem to have any issue taking them both as true either. Corporations are considered their own entity under the law, but they do not enjoy all the rights of people Corporations are treated as persons as a legal fiction to ensure that the methods for applying the law to their activities remains consistent and uncomplicated. No legal framework has ever treated corporations as natural persons able to formulate their own autonomous intentions and act on those intentions unilaterally. The law is not unaware of its own abstractions. The arguments for restricting "corporate speech" are confounding these distinct concepts together. If we are attributing rights only to natural persons, and hold that legal persons that are not natural persons do not possess rights on that account, then by the same account, we cannot attribute the power of speech to corporations, and must understand any speech that appears to originate with them as actually the product of the people who are merely using the corporation as a method of coordination. If we are attributing the power of speech to corporations, then we must likewise recognize their right to speak freely. In fact, the first amendment explicitly protects speech itself without regard to its origin, such that any entity capable of speech must by that very fact have the right to free speech. |