Nicholas Conrad on Nostr: That's the long and the short of it Well, there is a bit of a longer to it. There is ...

That's the long and the short of it

Well, there is a bit of a longer to it.

There is the doctrine of 'corporate personhood', which is a judicial precedence dating back centuries that means for the purposes of law, a corporate entity can be treated as distinct from any of its members. This is why you can e. g., sue a company directly instead of having to find a cause of action against an owner of the company.

However in the 2010 Citizens United case, scotus ruled that 1st amendment protections apply to corporate speech, leading to an absolute deluge of headlines, articles, and comedy central 'news' presenters claiming scotus had ruled "corporations are people" even though they said nothing of the sort. Anyone using this particular phrasing probably got it from the completely braindead reporting in the wake of citizens united, and never bothered to fact check it.

What scotus actually said in citizens united was that corporations are made up of people, and that you can't deny those people their 1st amendment speech rights just because they also happen to be exercising their 1st amendment association rights at the same time. So it ironically actually weakened the doctrine of corporate personhood.