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umanwizard01/18/20252 repliesview on HN

The court has never determined that corporations are people, that’s a completely unfounded meme.

What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.


Replies

iterance01/18/2025

Eh? Unless otherwise specified, corporations satisfy the definition of a person across all federal laws per 1 USC §1, which reads: "the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals"

That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.

hwillis01/18/2025

Totally beside the point. Verbatim from Citizens United:

> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.

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