Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T21:09:11.705Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Neither Persons nor Associations

Against Constitutional Rights for Corporations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

David Ciepley
David Ciepley*
Affiliation:
University of Denver
*
For correspondence, please write Dr. Ciepley at [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article challenges the practice of extending constitutional rights to corporations. Drawing on recent corporate law scholarship, it shows that a corporation is neither an association of natural persons nor an independent person (or “real entity”) itself. The rights of natural persons thus do not pass to it. Instead, the corporation is an abstract, property-owning legal entity entirely distinct from its members that owes its very existence to a complex of legal privileges granted by government. Having been constituted by government, the corporation cannot properly assert constitutional rights against it. Corporations have only what rights they are granted by charter or statute, and these do not and cannot include constitutional rights.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Fall 2013 , pp. 221 - 245
Copyright
© 2013 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

For helpful comments, the author thanks David Klein, Jeffrey Lustig, Charles McCurdy, members of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture, and participants in the University of Virginia’s Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law symposium. Thanks to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for financial support while the article was under revision.

References

Alchian, Armen, and Harold Demsetz. 1972. “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization.” American Economic Review 62 (5): 777–95.Google Scholar
Allen, William T., Jacobs, Jack B. and Leo E. Strine Jr. 2002. “The Great Takeover Debate: A Meditation on Bridging the Conceptual Divide.” University of Chicago Law Review 69 (3): 1067–1100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ames, Glenn J. 2008. The Globe Encompassed: The Age of European Discovery, 1500–1700. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Anderson, Gary M., and Tollison, Robert D. 1996. “The Myth of the Corporation as a Creation of the State.” International Review of Law and Economics 3 (2): 107–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armand, DuBois. 1938/1971. The English Business Company after the Bubble Act, 1720–1800. New York: Octagon.Google Scholar
Berle, Adolf. 1965. “Economic Power and the Free Society.” In The Corporate Take-over, ed. Hacker, Andrew, 86–102. Garden City, NY: Anchor.Google Scholar
Blair, Margaret. 2003. “Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century.” UCLA Law Review 51:387–455.Google Scholar
Ciepley, David. 2013. “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation.” American Political Science Review 107 (1): 139–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Easterbrook, Frank, and Daniel Fischel. 1985. “Limited Liability and the Corporation.” University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1): 89–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, Julian H. 2009. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Freund, Ernst. 1897. The Legal Nature of Corporations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gierke, Otto von. 1868/1913. Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. Vols. 1–4. Berlin: Weidman.Google Scholar
Gierke, Otto von. 1935. “The Nature of Human Associations.” In The Genossenschaft-Theory of Otto von Gierke: A Study in Political Thought, ed. Lewis, John D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Graham, Howard Jay. 1938. “The Conspiracy Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment, Part 2.” Yale Law Journal 48 (2): 171–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenfield, Kent. 2006. The Failure of Corporate Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, and Reinier Kraakman. 2000. “The Essential Role of Organizational Law.” Yale Law Journal 110 (3): 387–440.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, Reinier Kraakman, and Richard Squire. 2006. “Law and the Rise of the Firm.” Harvard Law Review 119 (5): 1333–1403.Google Scholar
Harkins, Malcolm J. 2010. “On the Road to Santa Clara and Beyond: Travels with the Supreme Court.” ExpressO. http://works.bepress.com/malcolm_harkins/60.Google Scholar
Harris, Ron. 1994. “The Bubble Act: Its Passage and Its Effects on Business Organization.” Journal of Economic History 54 (3): 610–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwitz, Morton. 1992. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lipton, Daniel. 2010. “Corporate Capacity for Crime and Politics: Defining Corporate Personhood at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Virginia Law Review 96:1911–64.Google Scholar
Maier, Pauline. 1993. “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation.” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1): 51–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maitland, F. W. 1900. “Introduction.” In Political Theories of the Middle Ages, by von Gierke, O. F., vii–xlvi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederick. 2003. Maitland: State, Trust, and Corporation. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mark, Gregory A. 1987. “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law.” University of Chicago Law Review 54:1477–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millon, David. 1990. “Theories of the Corporation.” Duke Law Journal, 1990 (2): 201–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morawetz, Victor. 1882. A Treatise on the Law of Private Corporations Other than Charitable. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Mumford, Lewis. 1961. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Posner, Richard. 1976. “The Rights of Creditors of Affiliated Corporations.” University of Chicago Law Review 43:499–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rajan, Raghuram G., and Luigi Zingales. 1998. “Power in a Theory of the Firm.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113 (2): 387–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, Nick. 2006. The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1776/1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tuck, Richard. 1982. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weiner, Philip P. 1974. Dictionary of the History of Ideas Volume III. http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaBook/tei/DicHist3.xml.Google Scholar
Williston, Samuel. 1888. “History of the Law of Business Corporations before 1800.” Harvard Law Review 2 (3): 105–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar