owsposters:

Occupy Pragmatism

Download the poster pack

Shenanigans for so many reasons.

First: Corporate personhood has been a thing for the past hundred years or so in the US. A corporation, like a person, has to be able to enter into contracts, sue, and be sued. Thus, we create a legal fiction that it’s a “person”.

Second: Based on that—and fucking common sense—no one on the supreme court would ever make such a stupid argument that corporations aren’t people. In fact, simplifying it down to personhood is dumb to the point it renders the argument meaningless, another reason why no one on the supreme court would make that argument.

Third: Kennedy will never retire. He’ll grow old, bask in his terribly-written Lawrence decision, and stay on the bench just to spite me.

Fourth: This whole “personhood” thing. Look, corporations can do certain things people can, as identified in point 1. The question is what limits they have and what under what circumstances they apply. Does the 14th amendment apply to corporations? Yes. Does the free speech clause of the first amendment apply to corporations? Per Citizens United, yes. Do I think it was wrongly decided? Sure. Not because the notion of corporate personhood needs to be revisited, but because if the past hundred years of first amendment caselaw have shown anything it’s that the court puts the notion of the marketplace of ideas above all else in this realm. But if speech is subject to marketplace analysis, then the court must consider the effect of a monopoly on these markets. And under Citizens, they don’t. 

But that’s an argument you apparently can’t put into a jpeg.

(via whineandbeer)

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’"

Perry v. Brown

pdf of the opinion

Above the Law & more links

Of Marketplaces and Speech

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

Slate

Writing for the majority Justice Kennedy writes: “There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations,” while not giving much thought to the fact that corporations weren’t treated as individuals (as understood by the Constitution) until recently; which is to say, not as originally understood.

He then goes on to talk about the open marketplace of ideas but doesn’t spend any time asking about the negative effect a monopoly has on the marketplace. In many ways, the marketplace is a good metaphor for this situation - is there really a marketplace when there is only one voice?