In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “I’m Not Much of a Person Anymore,” or, the Courts, the People and the Power of Dissent
  • Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. (bio)

Meanwhile, multinational corporations have become the latter-day equivalents of the East India Company. We now have government for the corporations, by the corporations, but almost no government of the corporations. That’s what “deregulation” means. “Corporate despotism” may be the best name for the mode of government we now have, but the term “democracy” remains a good name for a people’s disposition to hold one another, their leaders, and their corporations responsible for their acts. It may be a latent disposition, but it’s still worth singling out and cultivating to the degree we can.

—Jeffrey Stout, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 2 (2010): 433

Preliminaries

In reflecting upon the dramatic results of the midterm elections in November 2010, much was made of the alleged influence of the so-called Tea Party on a number of important senatorial and congressional races. Some have been tempted to see this as the enactment of a new kind of grassroots organizing, and thus as an exertion of democratic protest aimed at the perceived dysfunction of a centralized system run by a class of professional politicians. Perhaps it is that, at least for some participants in the movement; it is simply too early to tell. We have learned that it is a “movement” of a curious Neoliberal sort—funded in an extraordinarily [End Page 99] top-down fashion, no matter the ground-up rhetoric and populist sentiments of many participants. We do not yet know if this movement will coalesce into a coherent (if loosely organized) broad-based organization, because we do not yet know if the passions that took some people to the streets have staying power or not. Time will presumably tell.

What we do know for certain is that this was the first national election held after the dramatic decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (decided January 21, 2010),1 and the experience of that campaign season from a media standpoint may tell us something important about some of the unintended consequences of that decision (the recently finished 2012 electioneering season has confirmed some of these consequences, and raised significant ethical and political concerns along the way).2 One of the consequences of the decision, of course, was a dramatic reimagining of who, or what, counts as a person under the law, an imaginative sleight-of-hand with great consequence for that other great, if elusive, entity in any democratic society: We the People.

Given the legal thought experiment that invites us to imagine a corporation as a person capable of speech, some strange forces seem to have been unleashed by that decision. One of them appears as follows. It has become possible for a wealthy individual to incorporate him- or herself, and then to pay for political advertisements nominally as a corporation. But the corporate speaker, unlike an individual speaker, can remain wholly anonymous. We will see and hear a withering attack ad on television, and then we will be informed that a particular corporation paid for the ad. We will be told the name of that corporation, but we literally cannot discover the names of its constituent members—at least for now. Thus, in turning a corporation into a person under the law, we have enabled persons to turn themselves into corporations, thereby escaping the normal structures of accountability that apply to people when they engage in public speech. The real losers in all of this are actual people.

Given the staggering quasi-corporate funding that contributes to the poorly named Tea Party, now seems to be an especially significant moment in which to take a longer look at this momentous court decision, and the somewhat surprising question it poses: What is a person? It is a question of such elemental significance that it involves all of us—in history, legal theory, philosophical [End Page 100] ethics, and, of course, religious belief. What I would like to offer here, then, is a brief history of the background to this case, followed by a...

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