re: #757 oaktree

Who was it that said that they’d believe that corporations should be treated like individual human beings when Texas executes one?

NPR ran a good interview yesterday with a Yale law school professor, talking about some of the ways corporations should be treated as ‘metaphysical’ persons, and some of the ways we might benefit by distinguishing between these metaphysical persons and actual ones:

WITT: Well, for the Citizens United case, corporate personhood wasn’t required for purposes of the majority’s decision to strike down the regulations on campaign spending. Corporate personhood was invoked by the four dissenters in Citizens United. What the dissenters said was that the differences, which are very real, of course, between natural persons and metaphysical persons or corporations might be a good reason to distinguish between natural persons and corporations for purposes of regulating speech.

BLOCK: Well, Professor Witt, I wonder what you think when protestors in Occupy Wall Street talk about ending corporate personhood. What would that mean from a legal point of view?

WITT: I don’t think we’d want to end corporate personhood in the sense that ordinary people, including people in the Occupy Wall Street movement, may want to get together and form groups, which should have respect of the legal process. What we might want to do, and this is what the Occupy Wall Street folks have right, is recognize the different characteristic features of large groups invested with powerful amounts of capital in our political process.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141663195/what-is-the-basis-for-corporate-personhood