What Makes a Person?

Or: Corporations are (not) people, too.

If corporations are people, I’d like to see Shell cry at a funeral. I’d like to watch Google nervously fumble through a best man speech, or Walmart struggle to comfort a friend who just lost their job. And if we’re calling them people, then they should be able to sit on a jury, panic about mortality, and maybe—just once—feel shame.

But they can’t. Because they aren’t. And yet we’ve written them into our laws and our courts as if they are, granting them the rights of citizens while shielding the humans behind them from the responsibilities that go with those rights. That legal fiction—corporate personhood—was once a simple tool for managing property and liability. Today, it’s become a loophole big enough to drive democracy off a cliff.

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What does make a person… a Person?

Legally, a person is an entity recognized by the law as having rights and duties. That’s it. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, a person is “an individual or entity with legal rights and obligations.” That broad definition includes humans, of course—but also corporations, trusts, and in rare cases, natural features like rivers.

This flexibility is by design. Legal personhood is a tool—a way to decide who (or what) can enter contracts, own property, sue and be sued, or be held responsible under the law. But that legal tool has always carried moral weight. Because for most of history, personhood has meant more than just the capacity to sign paperwork. It’s implied consciousness, agency, and—most importantly—the capacity to be wronged.

That’s where Peter Singer and other animal rights philosophers come in. Singer argues that many animals—especially those capable of suffering, like apes, elephants, and dolphins—deserve personhood not because they can draft contracts, but because they can feel pain, form bonds, and experience injustice. He and others have pushed legal systems to recognize that where there is sentience, there should be standing.

And in a few rare cases, they’ve succeeded. India, in a landmark 2018 ruling, extended legal personhood to the entire animal kingdom—declaring animals to be legal entities entitled to dignity and protection. Elsewhere, it’s happened one animal at a time. In Argentina, a chimpanzee named Sandra was declared a “non-human person” and removed from a zoo on the grounds that her confinement violated her rights. Sandra was granted not just sanctuary, but standing—a quiet legal revolution in the form of one lonely primate.

Why? Because there was someone home. Sandra could suffer. Sandra could be wronged. Sandra had interests the law was finally willing to consider.

So now let’s ask the obvious question: Why, exactly, would we extend that same status to a corporation?

So corporations are people Persons, too?

On paper, it makes sense—at least at first. Remember that legal personhood isn’t about consciousness or compassion; it’s about contracts. The law needs a way to assign responsibility, enforce agreements, and settle disputes. If you couldn’t sue a company, collect damages, or hold it to its promises, business would be chaos.

That’s where corporate personhood comes in. It’s a legal placeholder. A filing cabinet with a nameplate. It lets companies act like individuals in a courtroom so that they can be taxed, fined, or sued.

And there’s a strong case for some of the protections that come with it. Take limited liability: without it, investors could be personally ruined if a company they hold stock in is sued. Imagine waking up to find your retirement savings obliterated because your mutual fund owns shares in a pharmaceutical company that lost a class action lawsuit. That’s not fairness. That’s punishment by proximity.

So yes—some features of corporate personhood are functional, not sinister. They make it possible to scale enterprise, pool resources, and share risk. But that legal tool starts to go sideways when we forget it’s just a tool.

Because while corporations can be sued, they can’t go to jail. While they can be fined, they don’t feel shame. And while the law treats them as individuals for convenience, they’re actually sprawling collectives of decision-makers, investors, and intermediaries. When something goes wrong—like a financial collapse or a public health catastrophe—everyone shrugs. The corporation “pays,” and nobody is really accountable.

Except—very rarely—when the fiction cracks.

Take the Sackler family. They owned Purdue Pharma, the company behind OxyContin and one of the central actors in the opioid epidemic. Normally, corporate ownership protects individuals from liability. But the Sacklers weren’t passive shareholders—they were deeply involved in decisions that drove aggressive opioid marketing despite growing evidence of harm. Documents showed they weren’t just collecting profits—they were steering the ship.

That was enough for prosecutors to pierce the corporate veil, forcing a personal settlement: over $6 billion from the Sacklers themselves. And even then, they didn’t admit wrongdoing. They didn’t face prison time. They walked away legally immune from further civil lawsuits.

It was an exception that proved the rule: when corporations are people, the real people behind them often get away with everything but profit.

Are civil rights for people or Persons?

Corporate personhood began as a bookkeeping convenience. It helped the legal system sue companies, tax them, and shield investors from personal financial ruin. That’s all it was ever meant to do—give the courts a name to write on the paperwork. But over time, that convenience morphed into something much bigger and more dangerous: a full set of civil rights, designed for humans, grafted onto legal fictions.

The transformation wasn’t sudden. It happened through a series of court decisions, each granting corporations a new privilege originally intended for actual people. In the late 1800s, corporations successfully invoked the Fourteenth Amendment—originally ratified to protect freed slaves—to strike down taxes and regulations that interfered with profits. Later, they claimed protections under the Fourth Amendment to block surprise inspections by government regulators. And they won.

And then there’s the First Amendment—the crown jewel of human civil liberties. Over time, corporations laid claim to that too, not just to advertise or print newspapers, but to speak in the political arena. That culminated in 2010 with the now-infamous Citizens United decision. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money on political messaging. Because they are, legally speaking, people. Because spending money is, somehow, speech.

But let’s pause on another case—one that hits even closer to home for millions of Americans. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that a corporation could exercise religious beliefs. Not the people who own it. Not the board. The company itself. Based on those beliefs, the company could deny employees access to birth control under their health plan—despite a federal mandate requiring it. A private employer’s “religion” became a reason to limit the healthcare rights of real human workers. That’s what happens when you let a logo pray.

So here we are. We’ve built a system where a corporation can sue you for defamation, refuse you medication on moral grounds, reject government oversight, and spend unlimited cash to influence your vote. It can do almost everything a person can do—except sweat, cry, or bleed.

And no, it can’t vote. But it doesn’t need to. It can buy the election.

What could possibly go wrong?

Giving corporations personhood isn’t leveling the playing field. It’s handing the elite one of those mech battle robot things, then calling it a “fair fight” when the rest of us show up in our skin and bones.

And we see the results every election cycle. Campaigns are no longer about votes—they’re about funding. Corporate PACs, industry lobbyists, and billionaire-aligned Super PACs now serve as the real gatekeepers of political viability. Want to run for Congress? Better have a few millionaires on speed dial. Want to get reelected? Better not upset the industries that fund the ad buys.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just math.

Oil companies don’t back candidates because they love democracy. Health insurance companies don’t donate because they want better public discourse. They do it because it works. Because they know that political power follows the money—and thanks to Citizens United, there’s no cap on how much they can spend shaping outcomes.

And they don’t need to pick sides. The beauty of corporate personhood—if you’re a CEO—is that you can fund both teams. That’s how Big Pharma ends up on the donor rolls of Republicans and Democrats. It’s how defense contractors enjoy near-unanimous bipartisan support for bigger budgets, even when we can’t get a healthcare bill past the starting line. It’s how Silicon Valley and Wall Street both manage to be villainized in public while pulling strings in private.

Corporate personhood doesn't just tilt elections. It saturates the entire process. It decides which policies get written, which laws make it to the floor, and which candidates get airtime. It's not just that the loudest voice wins—it's that some voices come amplified by billions in revenue, while others get drowned out entirely.

When you let legal fictions masquerade as voters, you end up with a government that responds more to corporate interests than to human needs. And the worst part is, we call it democracy.

Even if we got the money out of politics—even if we managed, somehow, to elect a wave of candidates who refused corporate donations and campaigned on restoring political equality—they still couldn’t fix the root of the problem.

Because Citizens United wasn’t just a bad law. It was a Supreme Court ruling that declared corporate political spending a constitutional right under the First Amendment. The Court didn’t just strike down campaign finance limits—it enshrined corporate personhood as a matter of civil liberty.

So now, it’s not just that ExxonMobil can spend unlimited money to influence elections. It’s that trying to stop them is considered a violation of their freedom of speech.

This is the part where it becomes clear: we’re not just dealing with corruption. We’re dealing with a self-reinforcing legal fiction so deeply embedded in our system that the system can’t remove it without constitutional surgery.

We can’t pass a bill to fix this. We need a fundamental rethinking of who has rights, who gets to speak in a democracy, and what we even mean by “person.”

How can we unrig the game?

We don’t need to dismantle corporations. We need to stop pretending they’re people.

Let them own property. Let them sign contracts. Let them be sued and taxed and regulated. That’s why we created them—to be useful legal instruments. But personhood? Rights of conscience? Free speech? That was never part of the deal. That’s not business. That’s farce.

Some worry that if we deny corporations civil rights, we’ll muzzle small publishers or silence dissenting voices. But that’s a misunderstanding of where speech actually lives. If you write something under your name, it’s your speech—whether you print it through a company, post it online, or shout it into a bullhorn. The First Amendment protects your ideas, not the paperwork you file to distribute them.

Corporate personhood doesn’t protect speech—it protects scale. It turns money into a megaphone and gives those with the most of it the loudest voice in the room. It’s not about press freedom. It’s about power.

Others worry about who gets to decide what kind of speech is allowed if corporations lose their rights. But we already regulate corporate speech. We don’t let companies lie about products, cover up safety risks, or market drugs that don’t work. That’s not censorship—it’s accountability. And if we can demand truth in advertising, we can demand truth in politics.

It’s time to draw a clean line: corporations don’t have civil rights because corporations aren’t civil beings. They don’t think, feel, or vote. They don’t need healthcare or representation or dignity. They don’t cry when their kid graduates or worry about dying alone. Rights are for people. Power tools don’t need them.

Overturning Citizens United won’t be easy. The ruling wasn’t just bad law—it was constitutional law. The Court said, flat-out, that limiting corporate political spending violates the First Amendment. And that means no simple fix will do. No bill from Congress can override that ruling. We’d need a different Court—or a constitutional amendment.

But that’s not impossible. We’ve done it before. The Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson. It reversed Lochner. It reversed Roe, for that matter—proof that even so-called settled law can be uprooted by force of ideology. If they can gut a precedent to serve political power, then we can do it to reclaim democracy.

We’d need to elect lawmakers willing to break the very system that got them elected. Willing to drain their own war chests, cut off their corporate lifelines, and appoint justices who understand that rights were meant for citizens, not shells.

That, too, has precedent. In 1937, after years of Supreme Court obstruction, Franklin Roosevelt threatened to add justices to secure the New Deal. The Court backed down. It blinked. That wasn’t just politics—that was pressure. And pressure works.

We could expand the Court again. Or we could push through an amendment that says plainly: Only natural persons have constitutional rights, and money is not speech. Either way, we restore the obvious: that speech is for people. That power should serve the public. That democracy belongs to the living, not the fictional.

If we’re serious about reclaiming government by the people, for the people, then we have to stop letting legal fictions shout over the rest of us. Corporations are not people. They’re tools. And tools are meant to serve—not to rule.