What Rights Do Corporations Have?

Abstract

This chapter examines the idea of corporate personhood and the rights that flow from it. Gans argues that the Constitution never mentions corporations and doesn’t give corporations the same rights as individuals. He asserts that the Founders understood that there were fundamental differences between individuals and corporations, which received special privileges that individuals didn’t. While corporations have some rights, he argues that the Constitution cannot be applied wholesale to them. Shapiro agrees that corporations—or other groups of people, regardless of legal form—don’t have the same rights as humans. He gives several examples of corporate rights, however, and concludes that they’re a subset of the rights of natural persons. The disagreement here is over the scope of those rights and how to apply them.