So a lot of my progressive friends have been all het up about corporate personhood for quite some time. And I sort of got interested because I don't see how corporate personhood is an unqualified evil bad thing. So I started to read Thom Hartmann's book Unequal Protection and got about half a page in before I began to get really irritated.

First in his super-cursory recap of the history of corporate personhood, he omits reference to the birth of it in Anglo American law as the basis for the grant of corporate charter to for a the first English University in the 15th century (check this). Preferring instead to tar it completely with an "evil capitalist" patina in mentioning trading companies. This bugs the shit out of me because it glosses over the radical impact of trading companies as being one of the early steps in building a mercantilist opposition to master/serf relations. Suffice it to say that history is more complicated and contested than Hartmann's breezy assertions would indicate.

I think Hartmann has his whole project upside down. Corporate personhood has developed and grown because it has proved useful. A far more interesting question is why Americans have been content to let a formerly robust understanding of civil rights and their derivation as a field of inquiry lie dormant for and even wither during the latter third of the 20th century. Why not pose the question this way, what can civil rights learn from the development of corporate personhood? Why has one area of legal development been robust while the other has been anemic and what can be done about it? Or we can pose the question a different way, why have arguments in favor of corporate personhood been dynamic and successful while arguments for civil rights have been allowed to linger in 18th century understandings of rights and shored up by mid 20th century social science whose underpinnings have been shifting pretty continuously since before they were even referenced in equal protection cases. Or even more starkly, why were legal theorists and jurists content to hang equal protection law on a footnote in a a case related to a corporate personhood case?

What's called for may not be so much a critique of corporate personhood but a critical re-examination of civil rights and their relation to rights as derived from natural law theories.

And yeah, let me tip my hand. What if we stop looking at civil rights as a loose bundle of discrete rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and got back to the messiness of the underlying questions to unpack them anew? Let me posit the following, what marks human beings is their ability to develop and act on plans and projects. Where this intersects with corporate personhood is that really interesting human plans and projects are complex and social, even if we talk about them as inhering in individuals. Individuals conceive of, develop and further their plans and projects in a social context and often employ such social techniques as competition and cooperation to further them. What if we conceive of civil rights as those rights essential to enabling the realization of those plans and projects? Maybe that would be an interesting line of inquiry - I'm just sayin'.