Description: This is
a VOA Special English Economics Report.
See text below
Text:
Recently the United States Supreme Court decided a
big
case about political speech. Political speech is
considered
the most protected form of free speech under the
Constitution.
The case was Citizens United versus the Federal
Election Commission.
The question was this:
With political speech,
do corporations have the
same rights as people?
By a vote of five to four,
the conservative majority on
the court decided yes. Companies, labor unions and
other organizations may now spend as they wish on
independent efforts to elect
or defeat candidates.
The ruling is based on the idea
in the United States and many
other countries that a corporation is a legal
person.
Historian Jeff Sklansky says a slow shift to
personhood for American companies began with a
Supreme Court ruling in eighteen nineteen.
It said states cannot interfere
with private contracts creating corporations. In the
ruling,
Chief Justice John Marshall described a corporation
as an "artificial being" that is a "creature of the
law."
The ruling was unpopular.
It came as Americans resisted big corporations like
the First Bank
of the United States, chartered
by Congress. Some states passed
laws permitting themselves to change or even cancel
corporate charters.
After the Civil War in the eighteen sixties, the
Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution.
It provides that no state may "deprive any person of
life,
liberty or property, without due process of law ...
"
If a corporation is legally a person, then states
cannot
limit corporate rights without
due process of law either.
At first, corporations were not fully recognized as
persons.
But Jeff Sklansky at Oregon State University says
that changed.
He said the general direction of
the Supreme Court and the federal courts was to
recognize corporations as persons with the same
Fourteenth Amendment rights as individuals.
Yet corporations have a right
that real people do not:
limited liability.
For example, a corporation can
face civil or criminal fines
and individual lawbreakers can
go to jail. But limited liability means the actions
of a corporation are not the responsibility of
its shareholders.
Jeff Sklansky says the nineteenth century
development of limited liability helped shape the
modern corporation.
And that's the VOA Special
English Economics Report.
Next week, more on corporations
and the law.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
