I will believe that corporations are people when police and governments start executing them.
@WeirdWriter I’m not completely 100% sure of this but I believe #SCOTUS actually used that phrasing in one of their rulings.
@Thumper1964 a lot of people get this backwards (a lot of reporting gets it backwards, so that's understandable).
SCOTUS didn't really say corporations are people. It often said the opposite in its rulings.
BUT
Confusion (and political rhetoric) comes out of a legislative shorthand, a term of art ONLY in the context of drafting legislation, where legislators say when we use the term "people" in a statute we normally include corporations just so we don't have to keep repeating it.
That's the long and short of it. People are told this shorthand is meaningful, but it's really not.
Education and Law was their first victim.
I cannot possibly take enough psychedelic drugs and still not see that fact as clear as day. But this is just one example showing how Law becomes the whore and prostitute of an entire nation, at least 50% of an entire nation.
Nah, as bad as KBJ is at her job on the Court, she just represents the way democratic processes put rhetoric and popularity above merit.
But that's how the system works. It's the worst... except for all the others.
Government is necessarily a political system. This is what comes from politics. There should be no surprise at the outcomes.
Gotta embrace the political dimension and work with it because there's no getting away from it.
Me neither.
Not that popular political rhetoric has much to do with legal terminology, but...
Yes? Such terminology is pretty common everywhere from talking about the country being a good player on the world state, a citizen of the world, as if it was an individual, or talking about the country paying its share into one international effort or another.
It's odd that you haven't heard this.
That's the long and the short of it
Well, there is a bit of a longer to it.
There is the doctrine of 'corporate personhood', which is a judicial precedence dating back centuries that means for the purposes of law, a corporate entity can be treated as distinct from any of its members. This is why you can e. g., sue a company directly instead of having to find a cause of action against an owner of the company.
However in the 2010 Citizens United case, scotus ruled that 1st amendment protections apply to corporate speech, leading to an absolute deluge of headlines, articles, and comedy central 'news' presenters claiming scotus had ruled "corporations are people" even though they said nothing of the sort. Anyone using this particular phrasing probably got it from the completely braindead reporting in the wake of citizens united, and never bothered to fact check it.
What scotus actually said in citizens united was that corporations are made up of people, and that you can't deny those people their 1st amendment speech rights just because they also happen to be exercising their 1st amendment association rights at the same time. So it ironically actually weakened the doctrine of corporate personhood.