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Corporations Are Not People: An Analysis Of Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission, Melissa Gaughan
Corporations Are Not People: An Analysis Of Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission, Melissa Gaughan
Summer Research
In 2010, the Supreme Court answered this question in Citizens United v. FEC, which granted corporations First Amendment political speech rights and struck down limitations on independent expenditures by for-profit corporations. My research focused on the uses of legal theories of corporate personhood within the Citizens United decision. I found that the Court’s Citizens United decision used logic from several theories of corporate personhood to avoid acknowledging that there are different types of corporations, each with unique claims to political speech rights. The use of multiple theories of corporate personhood led the Court to conflate the two major types of …