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The Constitutional Rights Of Corporations Revisited: Social And Political Expression And The Corporation After First Nationial Bank V. Bellotti, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court has addressed only a few occasions the extent to which corporations enjoy those constitutional rights so fundamental to private citizens. In this article Professor O'Kelley discusses the inherent difficulty in applying familiar constitutional principles to corporations and examines those cases in which the Supreme Court has either extended or denied to corporations various constitutional rights. Finding that two underlying conceptual doctrines -- the Field rational and the associational rationale -- have guided the Court in previous decisions in this area, he then applies these doctrines in an analysis of the recent Supreme Court decision in First National …