In-Corp-O-Real: A Psychological Critique of Corporate Personhood and Citizens United

12 FSU Business Review 1 (2013)

109 Pages Posted: 7 Oct 2015

See all articles by Teneille R. Brown

Teneille R. Brown

University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law

Date Written: October 1, 2012

Abstract

It seems absurd today that a robot’s political speech could ever warrant First Amendment protection. And yet, fifty years ago the same claim regarding corporations would have seemed equally absurd. But here we are, with anthropomorphized corporations enjoying political free speech rights equal to ordinary human beings. While corporations are constitutional people and robots presently are not, it is not obvious that this will, or should, remain this way forever. In the not-too-distant future, robots will more closely resemble human beings in appearance and function. When — not if — this happens, how will courts distinguish corporations from robots for constitutional civil rights analyses? Throughout this Article, I will use robots as a practical foil for corporations to reveal the errors in the way the Supreme Court impetuously granted corporations political free speech rights as entities distinct from their members. I hope to prove that precisely because man-made corporations share more in common with robots than with human beings, we should not stretch the metaphor of personhood too far to apply our civil rights to them. Specifically, we should not bestow corporations with political speech rights that are equivalent to those of biological people based flimsily upon the fact that they metaphorically possess a few traits that humans also share. I will demonstrate that corporations may be subordinated to individual humans when it comes to expressing political speech because corporations do not possess fear, mortality, constrained perception, memory, computational processing, empathy, theory of mind, or any sincere emotion. Corporate speakers can take advantage of these traits in humans to persuade us to make political decisions that are not in our interest. But we cannot compel the same errors in corporations because corporations have no reciprocal sense of empathy, fear, or risk. In addition to providing corporations with an advantage over humans in the market-place of ideas, our complex psychology may also explain why we can be easily tricked into anthropomorphizing inanimate objects such as corporations.

Suggested Citation

Brown, Teneille R., In-Corp-O-Real: A Psychological Critique of Corporate Personhood and Citizens United (October 1, 2012). 12 FSU Business Review 1 (2013), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2670208

Teneille R. Brown (Contact Author)

University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law ( email )

383 S. University Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0730
United States

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