Individual human rights and liberties should transcend or out-rank the rights given to corporations.

Corporations and similar organizations are classified as APs, or "artificial persons." Corporations are treated as singular thinking and acting entities for legal purposes. The corporate person is a fiction; corporations and other organizations are made up of individuals or "natural persons" but are not "persons" themselves"the law is what personifies them. Whether it is good or bad for the law to personify corporations depends upon one"s goals. Certainly it is useful to treat the corporation as an entity that can sue and be sued, that can own property, and that can enter into contracts and commit torts. These are all things that make corporations look like individuals for legal purposes. But it would be strange to permit corporations to vote in elections or to claim violations of their "human rights" or their political rights more generally. The corporate form of organization is just that"a form of organization. Corporations are useful organizations"they help coordinate large numbers of natural persons and encourage investment and give room for individuals to engage in productive enterprise. But there are lots of different ways to organize natural persons in the world. Families, churches, clubs, towns, cities and other governments are all institutions that engage in productive activity. We do not have to treat any of them as persons for them to fulfill their missions. As far as I can tell, the Occupy Wall Street protesters do not care about whether or not the law treats corporations as legal persons for purposes of deciding whether or not they can make contracts, commit torts, own property, or bring lawsuits. When they refer to corporations they are not referring to the legal entities that are recognized by the law due to the operation of statutes for the incorporation of for-profit, nonprofit, and municipal entities. Rather, they are using the term corporations to refer to the social community of persons associated with the corporation: its leaders, its employees, its creditors, its shareholders, and even, perhaps, its customers. This usage is fairly new to me. I first became aware of it when I realized that the press was aggregating contributions made by the employees of an entity and reporting them as contributions attributable to the entity. Thus reported contributions by "Goldman Sachs" would include contributions by all of the employees of Goldman Sachs. So when Occupy Wall Street protesters object to "corporations," they are not objecting to their corporate form. They are objecting to the behavior of the persons associated with the entity. Consistent with this interpretation, the Occupy Wall Street protesters do not appear to be considering any changes in corporate and related laws related to the question of whether or not a corporation is treated as a legal person. Corporate person-hood actually benefits creditors and customers of corporations. Without person-hood, they wouldn"t be able to sue "the corporation" but would have to sue individual shareholders, from whom it would be much more difficult to recover. Corporations are not creatures of constitutions, but rather of the legislative power recognized by constitutions. It is the legislature that sets out the rules governing their existence. Corporate person- hood has no constitutional implications across the board. Courts decide on an issue-by-issue basis as to what provisions of a constitution affect corporations. Corporations, for instance, can"t vote, while people can. But corporations can assert a constitutional claim for compensation when their property is taken by the government, just as people can. n the context of the First Amendment, and in particular freedom of speech and freedom of the press, revisiting the capacity of corporations to exercise First Amendment rights is implausible. Virtually all newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and books, among other message-deliverers, are corporations, and to suggest that these entities do not possess First Amendment rights would undercut the information- and idea-providing function of the First Amendment, and would, in addition, be the occasion for a dramatic alteration in longstanding First Amendment doctrine and theory. But to say this is not to foreclose careful thinking about the extent to which elections, like other First Amendment settings and institutions, are or should be subject to distinctive and institution-specific First Amendment rules, doctrines, tests, and principles. Thus, some election-specific regulations of corporate contributions and expenditures in the electoral process would be consistent with the increasing institution-specific nature of First Amendment doctrine, and would do far less violence to the general principles of freedom of speech and press than would the broad acceptance of the implausible proposition that corporations cannot be the holders or claimants of First Amendment rights. In a world in which many of our messages and information are created and transmitted by corporations and similar large organizations, limiting generally the constitutional right to transmit messages and information to natural persons only would be highly unfortunate. I do not have exact sources, as most of the stuff I get are from books, because I find websites to be for the most part poorly written and not always correct.