From Professor Bainbridge:
Twelve pages of what purports to be legal and grammatical analysis follows. But Chief Justice Roberts could have summed up his opinion far more succinctly: “Because at least 5 of us say so.”
The Citizens United decision last term attracted much criticism–not least from Con Law Professor-in Chief Obama–for holding that a corporation is a person and as such has certain constitutional rights. While I agreed with the holding, I was disturbed that the Chief Justice’s majority opinion for the Supreme Court so obviously lacked a coherent theory of the nature of the corporation and, as such, also lacked a coherent theory of what legal rights the corporation possesses.
The utterly specious word games that drive this opinion simply confirm that Chief Justice Roberts has failed to articulate a plausible analytical framework for this important problem.