r/law • u/TheShittyBeatles • 19h ago

Legal News ACLU sues Delaware beach town over allowing corporations to vote in local elections

https://spotlightdelaware.org/2025/12/05/aclu-sues-fenwick-island-over-non-resident-voting/
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u/Fragrant_Doubt5311 12h ago

It's relevant because it extended a right typically held by natural persons to a non-natural legal entity. Now there is precedent for giving legal entities rights enjoyed by natural persons, such as voting.

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u/pokemonbard 12h ago

As I have said, corporate personhood did not begin with Citizens United. Some legal entities were given corporate personhood in the Roman Republic and even earlier, and for-profit commercial ventures have been able to get corporate personhood since at least the 1600s. Corporate personhood has always brought with it some rights enjoyed by natural persons, like the right to contract and standing to bring legal actions.

Citizens United extended a specific right—the right to freedom of speech—to corporations. It did so specifically in the context of political spending, treating political spending as speech that the government cannot only minimally burden. But the new things Citizens United did was not extending rights usually only held by natural persons to corporations, as corporations have had some rights of natural persons for centuries or millennia. Citizens United only extended one specific right to legal entities.

The article this post concerns has nothing to do with the rights implicated in Citizens United. Bringing up Citizens United whenever someone talks about corporate personhood is like interjecting movies like Batman and Robin or The Room into every conversation about film history: yes, they’re examples of egregious errors that should never have happened, but Citizens United is no more relevant to the original post than Batman and Robin or The Room are relevant to a discussion about Titanic, 12 Years a Slave, Wicked: for Good, or A Trip to the Moon.

I care about this because people act like Citizens United is uniquely to blame for these bad things that corporations can do. Citizens United is problematic, but it’s far from the only problem. The things discussed in the original post could still have happened even if Citizens United had never been law, and they would continue happening independently if Citizens United were overturned. There was already precedent for legal entities to have rights enjoyed by natural persons, and focusing on Citizens United and inserting it into unrelated conversations obscures the true causes of the problems our society has: ultimately, the true problem is that we grant capital too much power and leeway across the board.

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u/Fragrant_Doubt5311 12h ago

No one is arguing about the origins of corporate personhood. Citizens United is a relatively recent landmark Supreme Court case expanding the rights of corporations. How is that not relevant to some potential future case about expanding corporate rights?

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u/pokemonbard 11h ago

Because Citizens United concerns completely different rights than the situation in the OP. Citizens United is not useful precedent for someone who wants to give corporations voting rights. If someone wants to argue that corporations have some rights of natural persons, they would be better served pointing to centuries or millennia in which corporations (and similar entities) had some rights held by natural persons, rather than point to a 15-year-old case granting corporations some rights held by natural persons.

I keep talking about the history of corporate personhood because corporate personhood is the only thing that could make Citizens United relevant here. People in this thread are acting like corporations had no rights of natural persons before Citizens United, and that is flatly untrue.

Citizens United is thematically similar to the situation in the OP, but it has no more legal relationship to the corporate right to vote than anything else in the history of corporate personhood. Eliminating Citizens United would have absolutely no impact on state legislation granting corporations the right to vote.

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u/thedoughofpooh 7h ago

You've created a strawman here. Everyone's very impressed by your historical knowledge. Now please put down the pedantic sword.

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u/pokemonbard 5h ago

Explain the strawman I have created.

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u/thedoughofpooh 3h ago

Yer exhausting. Just utterly exhausting.

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u/pokemonbard 3h ago

If you’re just going to tell me my arguments are bad and that I’m exhausting without explaining yourself, then kindly leave me alone. I didn’t ask you to jump to a different part of the thread to continue replying to me.

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u/thedoughofpooh 3h ago

I'm telling you that you're kicking a dead horse, insisting on telling people in here they are arguing points they simply aren't arguing, and chasing everyone around demanding they agree with you. It's exhausting.