“In short, the vast majority of Americans believe, as they have always believed, that corporations should not have the right and power to dominate our democratic process.” New York, it emphatically rejected arguments that corporations had other rights protected by the Constitution.Īs the Court declared in 1907, referring to corporations, “the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment are the rights of natural, not artificial, persons.” Indeed, at the time no one would have imagined that that would someday be the case.Īlthough the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began recognizing the property rights of corporations in cases like Lochner v. Moreover, everyone knew when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 that its guarantees were designed primarily to secure the rights of the newly freed slaves, not to protect the rights of corporations.
Nor do the records of the Constitutional Convention provide any hint that the Founders ever thought about whether the Constitution was meant to extend its protections to corporations. There is nothing in the text of the Constitution that explicitly recognizes corporations or grants them individual rights. The Citizens United ruling contradicts the Founders, decades of Supreme Court precedent and the will of the American people.
