Comment by otterdude
3 months ago
I am continually baffled by the "logic" behind laws and the justice system.
If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
How can money be speech, if the constitution allows congress to regulate commerce, but prohibits it from abridging speech.
It just seems like in a common law system we're forced to live with half-assed arguments that corporate lawyers dreamed up while golfing with the judges.
Corporations aren’t people in the literal sense which the 13th amendment uses, nobody ever said they were. They just have the ability to do some people things. They can have a bank account or sign a contract. They cannot vote or enlist or do lots of things people can do. (The technical name is ‘juridicial people’ and what they can or cannot do is spelled out in law quite well.)
Money isn’t speech, and no court ever said it was. The ads you buy with money are speech. What’s the difference between a Fox news editorial show or a right-leaning ad on Fox News? (The answer: who pays for it.) If news organizations are just things owned by people, what makes them more worthy of expressing opinions than other things owned by people? Just because they have “news” in their name?
You just think they’re half-assed because you have the cartoony idea of what they are expressed by media that doesn’t like them. They’re quite sensible.
I guess my larger point is that words are manipulated to get to a desired effect in the justice system.
Slavery is defined as the practice of owning a "person" which the 13th amendment prohibits. As corporations are people why couldn't this apply using the same flexible level of logic our court system uses??? Its just picking winners and losers!!!
Regarding "money is speech", this is the implication and argument from Citizens United. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Slavery in the 13th amendment is not defined at all, and nowhere is there a legal definition of slavery that would include a non-human person.
And the latter is simply you (and others, you didn’t invent it) paraphrasing a ruling inaccurately. I paraphrased it more accurately.
So again, the only word manipulation is going on outside of the legal system and you’re arguing against straw men. The actual legal system (not the carton of it you imagine) is not nonsensical in either case.
Unfortunately the practical effect of whatever policy that comes out of this theorycrafting has left your media landscape an absurd and abject failure. Where the idea of objective truth being open to the highest bidder and allowed to change on a week by week, or day by day basis without challenge.. is a reality Americans now live every day.
If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. The opposite of our media landscape is countries that think they have free speech but really don’t, like most of Europe.
I’ll take having all the information in the world (true or false, purposefully curated for propaganda or organically reported) over any society that locks people up for social media posts deemed “fake”.
I have faith both in the marketplace of ideas leading to the best outcomes, and that the ability to lock people up over false speech will be weaponized eventually.
The American media landscape is the only possible result of true freedom of speech combined with the internet. It’s faaaaar from perfect but I do believe it’ll be the best in the end.
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"Money is speech" is kind of a misleading interpretation because it comes with all sorts of baggage that people typically infer from a thing "being speech".
Phrased another way: the argument is that limiting one's ability to spend is practically a limitation on their speech (or their ability to reach an audience, which is an important part of speech). If some president can preclude you from buying billboards, or web servers, or soapboxes on which to stand: he has a pretty strong chokehold on your ability to disseminate a political message.
I'm not defending that argument, only saying what it is as I understand it.
My arguments are as bad-faith as the arguments that lead to corporate personhood and citizens united. Fight fire with fire.
The law is very much like a programming language in that it is attempting to abstract a concept from practice, so that it is useful in many applications instead of just one. In both cases these abstractions are always flawed. In the law's case, that's why we have judges.
The problem is judges, especially in a common law system.
Computers follow the machine code PERFECTLY. For the legal system judges get to embark on a jazz odyssey of bullshit.
Were living in an easy to track, decades long legal conspiracy to abuse power for corporations - based on the Powell memo.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYoqcr7bAIs7kdyMhh-9m...
Except that natural language is imperfect, as are lawmakers, as are lawmaking processes.
Following exclusively the letter of the law, even where unambiguous, is not a win. That's effectively how people are trying to skirt the intent of a law (see: every corporation).
The letter and the spirit are both important. Judges make bad judgments, they also make good judgements. Such is life.
A corporation is a person, not a human. Person is an abstraction used by law, but it has no direct relation to a human being.
The law has lots of weird terminology. For example they have "exhibits" that are really just some crappy figures in an appendix of someone doing something bad, and not actual exhibits that you can buy tickets to visit.
> A corporation is a person, not a human. Person is an abstraction used by law, but it has no direct relation to a human being.
Most English dictionaries define person as a human.
I think the legal concept of person ("legal" or "juristic" person) as applied to corporations is something entirely different that, by unfortunate coincidence, shares the same name.
The definition for person is "a living human".
This argument is just ridiculous, a corporation is a corporation. That contains subsets of people who have rights (shareholders, employees).
The legal term you are looking for is Natural Person. Not every Person is a Natural Person.
Isn't this sort of defense a weak argument by the courts. If your abstraction is to override a well known common usage/function of a term, then the abstraction doesn't hold much water?
> If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
We simply pass a law saying that the act of incorporating a company is, among other things, punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and the 13th amendment problems go away.
As programmers we should be used to the X is Y but not quite type of business logic. Often a hack (but isn't calling Apple a person a hack too?)
> If corporations are people,
Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is distinct.
Composition, not inheritance.
> If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
Sports players are people, but their service is bought and sold by teams. Is that slavery, too?
Slaves generally don't get to choose not to participate. Sports players are as much wage slaves as Hollywood actors or Walmart greeters, albeit with much shorter runways to comfortable lifestyles.
My argument is created to test the original "corporations are people" legality in common law.
- slavery, the owning of people, is prohibited by the 13th amendment. - the law of the land is that corporations are a type of legal person based on the famous ruling based on the 14th amendment - corporations are bought and sold, and owned by shareholders. Can they be people if this is so?
obviously there is a problem here with all of the contradictions involved, but thats the point of my argument. The legal system picks and chooses the desired outcome, and doesn't actually pay attention to the words involved.