In most countries, a corporation has the same rights as a natural person to hold property, enter into contracts, and to sue or be sued.
[4] The word "corporation" itself derives from the Latin corpus ("body"), and juridical personhood is often assumed in medieval writings; by the Renaissance period, European jurists routinely held that churches and universities chartered by the government could gain property, enter into contracts, sue, and be sued, independent of its members.
The non-human entities given the "legal person" status by the law "have rights and co-relative duties; they can sue and be sued, can possess and transfer property".
", as well as trust estates, deity, temples, churches, mosques, hospitals, universities, colleges, banks, railways, municipalities, and gram panchayats (village councils), rivers, all animals and birds.
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), the Court found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 exempted Hobby Lobby from aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because those aspects placed a substantial burden on the company's owners' free exercise of sincerely held religious beliefs.
In applying and enforcing these constitutional guaranties, corporations cannot be separated from the natural persons who compose them."
Similarly, proponents might argue a juridical person can be a device for exercising shareholders' rights to free speech.
The dominant view from the 1920s to the 1980s, championed by philosopher John Dewey, asserted that such perspectives are often overgeneralizations, and that the decision to grant corporate rights in a given sphere should be governed by the consequences of doing so[citation needed].
[11] The Citizens United majority opinion makes no reference to corporate personhood or the Fourteenth Amendment, but rather argues that political speech rights do not depend on the identity of the speaker, which could be a person or an association of people.
The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the original Crown charter provided the authority for the corporation's Board of Visitors to make changes including the reorganization.
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations.
[14][chronology citation needed] In 1818, the United States Supreme Court decided Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward – 17 U.S. 518 (1819), writing: "The opinion of the Court, after mature deliberation, is that this corporate charter is a contract, the obligation of which cannot be impaired without violating the Constitution of the United States.
Seven years later, Chief Justice Marshall stated: "The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men.
Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution.
[citation needed] Federal statutes that refer to "persons" generally include both natural and juridical ones, unless a different definition is given.
This general rule of interpretation is specified in Title 1, section 1 of the U.S. Code,[22] known as the Dictionary Act, which states: In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise— the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals; This federal statute has many consequences.
[citation needed] Among the most frequently discussed and controversial consequences of corporate personhood in the United States is the extension of a limited subset of the same constitutional rights.
Ralph Nader, Phil Radford and others have argued that a strict originalist philosophy should reject the doctrine of corporate personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment.