Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?
62 Pages Posted: 3 Oct 2014
Date Written: September 24, 2014
Abstract
Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic “Yes.” Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a case study, I develop this theory of corporate personhood and explore some of its constitutional implications.
Keywords: Corporate constitutional rights, Contraception mandate, First Amendment
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation