New Supreme Court Justice Expressed Views On Corporate Personhood

This interesting article from the Wall Street Journal from last month describes comments made by the newest Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, during recent arguments made before the court on a "campaign finance case", which although not mentioned in the article is most likely that of Citizens United v. F.E.C., the case I spoke about several weeks ago.

The article states that Justice Sotomayor said this about the legal foundation of corporate personhood:

"[Judges] created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons....There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

In effect, Justice Sotomayor appears to support the idea of curtailing certain corporate rights, which, as has been mentioned before, arose from a case over a century old which did not even speak about corporate rights in the court opinion but rather were stated as a comment by the then-Chief Justice and scribed by the court reporter.

Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, our current Supreme Court leans far too heavily in supporting corporate values at the expense of state and individual rights, and the conservative majority is likely to rule in favor of Citizens United, though the extent of their ruling is yet to be seen. However, there is optimism in seeing a sitting Supreme Court Justice mention the very artificial and dubious basis of the extension of corporate rights, and depending on how and when vacancies in the Supreme Court occur, significant changes may result in the not-too-distant future.

The article itself is a good, quick read, offering further insight into the history of corporate rights, and some cases on which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. One worth mentioning was a case from the late 1920s wherein the Supreme Court struck down a state tax on transportation companies on the grounds that it did not tax taxi drivers as well, and thus it was struck down because it did not afford the corporations the same rights as the taxi drivers. Rationally it makes very little sense to me. Corporations are creatures of statute, and must abide by special provisions and regulations but also already receive special exemptions and protections...as such, how can it be defended that an entity that exists under such different rules automatically receives the same privileges of citizens who exist and abide under different rules?