It is hardly a radical idea in modern western society to treat a corporation as a so-called "legal person."

Only real people can think and act as individuals but there are all sorts of situations when they want to associate with one another, form groups, and act in some coordinated fashion through the group. All sorts of business associations fit within this category: corporations, LLCs, partnerships, limited partnerships, business trusts, trade associations, etc.

All sorts of other entities are not directly business-related but otherwise constitute groups formed for various important associational purposes: labor unions, non-profit organizations, political organizations, etc.

With respect to all such entities, somewhere in the law books one will always find some form of formal authorization recognizing that the entity can be established under law and that it has legal rights and responsibilities. It can take certain prescribed organizational forms. It can admit or exclude real persons as owners, principals, or beneficiaries of the entity. It can appoint real persons to manage its affairs within the rules and confines of what the law prescribes it can do. It can enter into contracts. It can sue. It can be sued. It has certain compliance responsibilities necessary to meet minimum requirements to begin and to continue its status as the particular type of entity that it is.

In giving these entities the power to act in this manner, the law effectively recognizes them as fictional "persons" for legal purposes only. This is short-hand way of saying that they have the same rights as individuals would have in a like situation. For example, if my corporation sells you a product and you refuse to pay, "it" (as a legal "person" acting through its lawfully recognized representatives) can file suit in a court of law to get a judgment against you and can exercise all available legal rights to enforce that judgment and collect its money. Similarly, "it" can go to a bank and open an account in "its" name. Or it can file "its" charter document giving it birth as an entity. Or file "its" dissolution papers signifying its legal death. In all such cases, "it" can only act through real individuals who do these things in some manner that the law recognizes as being in a proper representative capacity. They act as its agents and bind it legally in its affairs.

Can such entities commit torts or crimes? Absolutely. In such cases, the entity itself may be hit with money judgments or fines and its authorized agents who participated in the actions constituting the tort or crime may have direct liabilities of their own for their conduct, or even face criminal sanctions, including imprisonment.

Corporations are "persons" in the sense just described. As readily appears from this analysis, though, there is nothing at all strange about recognizing them as such. They are "persons" in the same way as, e.g., labor unions are "persons" - that is, the law recognizes their power to act lawfully as entities in the society and to do the things they are allowed to do under the charter and statutes authorizing them to be formed in the first place.

Against this background, a few observations about this piece:

1. It is hardly correct to suggest that the Supreme Court does not know what it is doing by recognizing the "personhood" of corporations because, given this logic, the next step is to give General Motors a right to vote. Throughout decades if not centuries of experience in the law's dealings with entities, it has always been clear that the legal rights given to entities must be appropriate to the form of entity involved and need not extend to all rights held by living individuals. It is perfectly sensible to say that a corporation (or a labor union, for that matter) has protectable free speech rights but does not have things such as a right to vote. A vote represents the suffrage rights of the citizenry and inherently applies to individuals only. Speech can be done by real individuals acting as individuals or by entities acting through their authorized representatives advocating on behalf of the entity.

2. All sorts of corporations have been routinely accorded free speech rights in an unbroken chain right up through this recent decision - they are called the "press," and everywhere we look we find the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and myriad other corporations exercising unquestioned free speech rights as organizations. What the Supreme Court did 20 years ago, and what was reversed in the recent decision, was to say that any corporation not acting as part of the press did not have protectable speech rights.

3. The above constitutes a legitimate debate about the proper scope of the First Amendment. But the recent decision does nothing radical in this respect. It pretty much restores the politics of American issue-advocacy to the state it has always been in prior to the last decade or so.

4. Nothing radical has been decreed with respect to the "personhood" of corporations. This is a long-established and non-controversial legal concept that has now been applied to a particular question of constitutional law over which various factions have vigorously fought. The application of the concept might be disputed, as it was in this case and by the majority and dissenting justices, but the concept itself can hardly be disputed unless we are to strip all entities of their power to function in our modern society.