Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law, page 1

reply to post by ExPostFacto

Corporate personhood is legal mumbo jumbo and utter rubbish designed to offer the same constitutional protectons afforded actual living breathing human beings.

The Supreme Court decision often cited in cases involving corporate personhood Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Railroad was decided by a court reporter that happened to be a former President of a Railway Company.

The first words of the constitution are We the PEOPLE...

The current decision before the court would allow unlimited donations of money to political candidates protected as free speech.

From Wiki

Decision

The court's actual decision was uncontroversial. A unanimous decision issued by Justice ruled on the matter of fences -- in that the state of California illegally included the fences running beside the tracks in its assesment of the total value of the railroad's property. As a result, the county could not collect taxes from Southern Pacific that it wasn't allowed to collect in the first place.[12]

The Supreme Court never reached the equal protection claims. Nonetheless, this case is sometimes incorrectly cited as holding that corporations, as juristic persons, are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.[13]
[edit] Significance

As such, it did not technically - in the view of most legal historians - have any legal precedential value.[14] However, the Supreme Court is not required by Constitution or even precedent to limit its rulings to written statements.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1949, "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions.. Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives."

Justice Hugo Black wrote "in 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, decided for the first time that the word 'person' in the amendment did in some instances include corporations...The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments...The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations."

This is as important as campaign finance reform IMHO. Of course the corporations want to be able to completely control our political system with money seen as protected speech.