Montana High Court Says ‘Citizens United’ Does Not Apply In Big Sky State | | AlterNet

[ksmith]

I don’t usually read stories about legal decisions, and seldom if ever read the decisions themselves. But the Montana Supreme Court’s decision to uphold state law regulating how corporations can raise and spend money on campaigns in spite of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is rather enjoyable. Even the dissenting opinion is a scorcher:

“While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law,” Nelson began, “I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”

Montana High Court Says 'Citizens United' Does Not Apply In Big Sky State | | AlterNet.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Comments

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, I read an essay by Owen Barfield in which he discussed the legal fiction of corporations, and how it related to the very nature of language (fascinating essay, by the way, based on the concept that all language is essentially a lie...but a benign one in that no word actually "is" what it names. It's all metaphor. As long as it's kept concrete, "flower," "tree," "chair," the fact that the word and the thing are conflated isn't too bad, because the real thing is there for comparison. But the more abstract, the less truth content. Legal fictions are particularly problematical.)

I may have misrepresented some aspects of the essay, since I didn't re-read it before posting this and it's been years since I did...but he made it clear that the corporation as "person" was designed to remove responsibility from actual persons and place it on a fictional "person" who was thus not able to be held accountable.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Responsibility and risk, though corporate officers can be jailed if they break the law.