Should the government be able to ban books and movies?
Well, the United States government says yes.
At least it did in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Now youíve probably heard of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission as the case
in which the Supreme Court says that corporations are just like people and should be able to
spend as much money as they want on politics.
But the government's position in that case was that if a corporation had any role in
producing or distributing a book or movieósay, Barnes & Noble selling a book or Disney, Pixar,
or MGM making a movieóthe government could ban it if it contained even one line of political
advocacy.
Thereís a lot more to the case in this idea of "corporate personhood" than what you might
have heard.
Corporations are not people, and nobody thinks they are.
The Supreme Court doesn't think they are.
But corporations have been recognized as persons for purposes of the law for centuriesóin
the United States, at least since the 1819 Supreme Court decision in Dartmouth College
v. Woodward, but really going back quite a bit further into the common law.
So if corporations aren't people, what are they?
Well, theyíre not just office buildings, or desks, or telephones.
Corporations consist of, in fact, managers and executives and shareholders.
That's really what a corporation is.
By treating corporations as people, for legal purposes, we create a great many advantages
for our society.
In fact, imagine if we didn't treat a corporation as a person.
How would you sue a corporation?
If you wanted to sue Exxon, you'd have to find the millions of different shareholders
and sue them all individually.
That doesn't sound like a very satisfactory way to run a court system.
Having corporations recognized as people for legal purposes allows corporations to buy
and sell property without having to retitle the property every time somebody sells their
stock.
It enables people to pool their resources to create great new products for us.
It allows the creation of an Apple that produces iPhones and iPads that we can use.
That would probably not happen if you didn't have some mechanism for people to bring all
their property together.
So the idea of a corporation as a person, as a legal concept, is very valuable to us.
Now, do corporations have all the rights of real people?
Well no, of course they don't.
But corporations have all the rights that we as people have when we assemble, when we
join together.
So John can speak, and you have a right to speak, and I have a right to speak, and the
three of us have a right to speak together.
And we have a right to get a whole bunch of other people to join with us.
And we can all go down to city hall, and we don't lose our rights to the First Amendment,
our rights to speak and assemble and petition, simply because we join together and simply
because we might organize ourselves as a corporation in order to handle our administrative and
management affairs.
Think about what would happen if corporations didn't have rights.
The government could just seize corporate property and leave the shareholders holding
worthless pieces of stock that are of no value whatsoeveróand they could do that with no
due process and with no just compensation.
It could search office buildings of corporations, because if corporations didn't have rights,
who would have standing to object when the government came around to do warrantless searches?
Corporations don't have rights because they're people.
They're not.
They have rights because we have rights as people.
And we have rights as people even when we join together with other people, and we have
rights even when we form corporations.
We form corporations to help us do the things we want to do in life, whether it's go into
business or hold property together, or even organize a nonprofit like the Sierra Club
or the ACLU.
So when you say that corporations shouldn't have rights, you're restricting not the rights
not of some amorphous group or thing that nobody's ever heard of, you're restricting
the rights of real people.
And when we think about the position that the government took in Citizens United, that
the government has the right to ban a book or a movie simply because a corporation had
some role in producing or distributing it, I think we should be awfully glad that corporations
have rights.
And thatís something you probably havenít heard about Citizens United.