To the Editor:
Re “The Rights of Corporations” (editorial, Sept. 22), about the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission:
When our Constitution was written, corporations may have had much broader interests in civic matters that might have made them generous toward civic affairs, yet they were not personified.
Today, corporations have evolved to have the narrow interest of maximizing returns to their investors and to their executives, often denying the rights of their employees and the small stockholder. To allude to their control, or behavior, as being representative of the stockholders, or the will of the people, is delusional.
They aggregate great wealth, and use this exclusively to advance toward more wealth. And, when applied to influence legislation, they are devoid of personhood. To give them new rights would show that they have bought a place in our government, at the deepest level, the Supreme Court.
Edward Colbert
Concord, Mass., Sept. 22, 2009
To the Editor:
The Times’s argument that corporations should have “limited” free speech rights, “far less than those of people,” was ironic. If accepted, it would gut The Times’s own free speech rights, since The New York Times Company is a corporation—something that didn’t stop it from winning the landmark First Amendment ruling New York Times v. Sullivan.
Giving corporations free speech rights is necessary to protect the rights of the people they employ. If companies didn’t have free speech rights, they could be held liable for the constitutionally protected speech of their employees and agents, effectively forcing them to censor such people.
That may explain why modern human-rights charters protect corporations. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, allows “any person, nongovernmental organization or group of individuals” to seek redress, leading to many court rulings in favor of companies, like Dubus S.A. v. France.
Hans Bader
Washington, Sept. 22, 2009
The writer is a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 