[PEN-L:33414] Local Government Rejects Corporate Personhood

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

You want a justification for corporate personhood? It furthered what you might euphemistically called economic development, and more concretely corporate capitalist expansion. There's no secret that the courts adopt rules that promote business interests all the time. Lots of them are even quite up front about it. Is it bad for them to do that? Depends, doesn't it. What the hell do you expect them to do, anyway? They'rte not making or interpreting law for a socialist society. In a socialist society, the courts will make socialist law.

As for circularity, the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. I wish I'd said that, but Holmes beat me to it. This isn't bad case of circularity, anyway. Maybe the first court to cite Santa Clara as precedent was cheating to use it as precedent, I don't know if what you say is true, but constitutional courts make up new rules all the time. The constitution also doesn't say expressly that state legislatures can't squelch political speech. It was made to say that by the incorporation of the First Amendment. I assume you don't have a problem with that one.

As for legislative precedent, you're talking the framer's intentions. This is constitutional interpretation. The personhood is that of the 14th Amendment. Are you waxing originalist? And if you are, do you suppose the Radical Republicans of 1866 would have had a problem with corporate personhood? If, like me, you're kind of a textualist, the word "person" is broad and ambiguous, and it's not crazy to read to include suprahuman entities.

jks

 Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "andie nachgeborenen"

> If the corporate personhood rule wasn't adopted in the case that is
usually cited as its origin, it was adopted in subsequent cases. To
avoid circularity, it has to start somewhere.
>
>
>
> Ian

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Trivially true. The larger issue is the interests and norms that went
into the *creation* of corporate personhood and their utter lack of
justificatory objectivity in mitigating the illusion of non-circularity
with regards to the stipulations/axioms that stand as "truth-makers." A
temporal *starting* of a body of case law is not equivalent to nor an
adequate justification for a non-circular justification for the creation
of an interpretation of a law, nor in the juridical establishment of a
legal norm that "brea! ks" with legislative precedents and intents, which
is what the entire case history of corporate personhood did. Defining a
corporation as a person doth not of necessity make it so and thus may be
endlessly contested. Holmes "infernal capriciousness of the law" stands
in stark relief when one looks at the post 1886 history of corporate
governance. But, hey, that's capitalism for 'ya.

Ian

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