Posted on 09/17/2009 2:09:37 PM PDT by Admiral_Zeon
WASHINGTON -- In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.
During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.
But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.
Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "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."
After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.
"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Time for some TRUST BUSTING. Small businesses create most of the jobs. Trim the big corporations down to a reasonable size and they can create the 20 million new jobs this country needs.
You may not be aware that corporations have 2nd Amendment rights, too. In fact, many of the legal owners of machine guns in civilain hands are US corporations!
“liberal Constitutional Accountability”
THERE’S an oxymoron.
How so?
[Below is a review I found on Amazon.com of an excellent book on this subject by a conservative scholar from the Hoover Institute named Robert Hessen. Highly recommended]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IN DEFENSE OF THE CORPORATION (1979)
by Robert Hessen
Reviewed on February 28, 2001
by Jean-Francois Virey
“The essence of capitalism is the inviolability of individual rights, including one’s right to use or invest one’s wealth as one chooses, and one’s right to associate with others for any peaceful purpose and under any terms of association that are acceptable to all parties concerned.” - Robert Hessen
The book can be roughly subdivided into two halves. The first half is mostly an historical argument against the “concession theory” of the corporation, showing that the conception of the corporation as a “creature of the state” operating by privilege is an anachronism inherited by mistake from the feudal era. On the contrary, Hessen defends what he calls the “inherence theory”, which shows the corporation to be reducible to the individual rights of its owners.
I was particularly interested in the refutation of the attacks on the so-called “privilege” of limited liability, which can even be found in the writings of such a conservative historian as Clarence B. Carson. Hessen shows that there are two kinds of limited liability. The first one, limited financial liability, can be explained quite simply as an implied contract between the corporation and its creditors. And the second one, limited liability for torts, is shown to be perfectly reasonable as far as shareholders are concerned.
The second part of the book is a defense of the freedom of incorporation against attacks made by Ralph Nader in two books he published in the 1970s. Nader advocated the federal incorporation of “large” corporations and the turning of their right to engage in interstate commerce into a privilege which the federal government could then use as a stick to make them comply with socialist legislation.
Hessen brilliantly exposes the illogic and arbitrariness of these recommendations, and casts doubt on the value of Nader’s scholarship by demonstrating how he resorted to “phantom footnotes” (”that is, citations which prove to be unverifiable and either bogus or deceptive”) and used unreliable sources to support his claims.
Against Nader, whom he shows to be another modern disciple of Rousseau, Hessen concludes that corporations “are created and sustained by freedom of association and contract, that the source of freedom is not governmental permission but individual rights, and that these rights are not suddenly forfeited when a business grows beyond some arbitrarily defined size.”
What are you talking about????
“Prior to the decisions Sonja is worrying about when rich people died their assets were parceled out among their heirs ~ not handed over to Communist apparatchiks to misuse! “
Can this lady not think of other errors committed by the court—errors which need fixing a lot worse than this?
He doesn’t jest.
And don’t call him Shirley.
Ever wonder why there are no charitable trusts like them dating back to,let's say, 1791?
The enabling legislation for such organizations is of recent vintage. Earlier laws assumed the heirs had a claim on the goods!
Wait a minute. What is a corporation? If I get together with a majority of my neighbors in a housing development and we come up with agreements on how to safeguard the value of our homes, do we constitute a “corporation? Would we then be denied our 1st Amendment protections? Think long and hard about the reprecusiuons of Soto(all Latino all the time)mayor’s ideology.
Driving these companies out of the country. She won’t be able to tell India or China how to run the companies and neither will tolerate interference from a smart arse self appointed judge (hehe, pun unintended) of how a company should be run.
I understand that part of you dialoge.
All I was replying about was that I felt she would be very receptive to the Socialist version of inheritance.
I was NOT refuting ANYTHING you wrote.
This is precisely what I was warning about should Sotomayor be confirmed. I wrote multiple times she was an attention whore, and that the MSM was going to focus on her leaving the rest of the court cloaked in the background.
She's the prob'y. She's the new kid. She's a junior member of the SCOTUS, but the MSM are going to make her the spokesperson for American Constitutional law.
The DA Republicans helped put her there.
Agree 100%. I do not understand the idiots on this thread who are cheering this talk from Sotomayor, saying, "Dere aint no such ting as group rights!" That's not the issue!
As I said upthread, if government is allowed to constrain what it defines as "corporate" speech, it will find a way to expand the definition of "corporate" as broadly as possible. They will bypass the First Amendment the same way they want to bypass the Electoral College.
Perhaps she should follow court protocol and STFU!
I’m worried here. I know that I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Yet, I can readily recognize what they are attempting to do to the American people. People with much more intelligence and knowledge than I possess appear to be stumped by all this. It’s getting scary folks.
The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and does not say that it is to be denied any grouping of people (such as a political party, for example; or what we call now a corporation).
=oP
The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and does not say that it is to be denied any grouping of people (such as a political party, for example; or what we call now a corporation).
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