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Show 132 liberties, and basic human rights. After the New Deal Era, the Court was quiet on the issue of corporate personhood until the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, the Court granted corporations free speech rights in Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Commission (1980), which protected corporations' right to make commercial speech, and after First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), the Court ruled that corporations also have the right to political speech. This did not come without disagreement among the sitting Court. In Bellotti, Chief Rehnquist famously opined in his dissent that, a State grants to a business corporation the blessings of potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance its efficiency as economic entity. It might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere. Furthermore, it might be argued that liberties of political expression are not at all necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist…I would think that any particular form of organization upon which the State confers special privileges or immunities different from those of natural persons would be subject to like regulation, whether the organization is a labor union, a partnership, a trade association, or a corporation. Despite Rehnquist's acerbic dissent, the latter half of the 20th century nonetheless used Santa Clara to support an even broader interpretation of the constitution to secure corporations the right to free speech. Before the 1960s, corporations really only enjoyed protection under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause, but since then the constitutional corporate subject has "boast[ed] a panoply of Bill of Rights protections" that includes protections under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution (Mayer, 1990). It is thus easy to see how more recent decisions such as Nike v. Kasky (1998) (freedom of advertisement speech), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) (freedom of political speech), and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) (freedom of religion) are merely following a |
