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Neither Persons Nor Associations: Why Recent Corporate Law Scholarship Undercuts Citizens United And The Constitutional Rights Of Corporations, David Ciepley
David Ciepley
This Article challenges the Supreme Court’s practice of extending constitutional rights to corporations, using Citizens United (2010) as the focal point of its analysis. Originally, corporations were understood to receive all their rights in grant from government. This precluded their holding constitutional rights against government. In the late 19th century, two new theories arose that conflate corporations with natural persons and thus attribute to corporations some of the rights of natural persons: (1) the “association” theory, which treats the corporation as little more than an association of natural persons, and (2) the “real entity” theory, which treats the corporation as …