Corporate speech doctrine reasserts a feudal conception of corporate self-rule

Evidence

As many legal scholars observe, the ideological orientation of contemporary First Amendment judicial reasoning asserts a close connection between free speech and property rights. The logic that links ownership to an absolute entitlement to freedom of expression has led to a privileging of corporate action as “speech” deserving of constitutional protection. Some scholars regard this as a dangerous reversion to the feudal doctrines from which corporate law evolved in the seventeenth century. Those medieval legal principles limited the sovereign’s authority over “the corporations of Aristocracy, Church, guilds, universities, and cities… who asserted the right to rule themselves.” One result is that US courts have been “quick to see the possibilities of governmental overreach, but much less willing to see the problems of ‘private,’ let alone corporate, power.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the specific legal logic connecting property rights to speech protection for corporations.
• XREF: Echoes Elizabeth Warren and corporate personhood critiques; connects to the chapter’s argument that free speech is repurposed as corporate power. — connects to: Corporate political expenditures gained full free-speech protection in 2010 — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 298