Dworkin sobre Citizens United...

Ronald Dworkin comenta sobre la opinión Citizens United, en el blog de NYRB.

(gracias al blog de Roberto G. y Lucas A.)

Dice Dworkin:

'We should notice not just the bad consequences of the decision, however, but the poor quality of the arguments Justice Kennedy offered to defend it. The conservative justices savaged canons of judicial restraint they themselves have long praised. Chief Justice Roberts takes every opportunity to repeat what he said, under oath, in his Senate nomination hearings: that the Supreme Court should avoid declaring any statute unconstitutional unless it cannot decide the case before it in any other way. Now consider how shamelessly he and the other Justices who voted with the majority ignored that constraint in their haste to declare the Act unconstitutional in time for the coming mid-term elections'.

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'The opinion announces and perpetuates a shallow, simplistic understanding of the First Amendment, one that actually undermines one of the most basic purposes of free speech, which is to protect democracy. The nerve of his argument—that corporations must be treated like real people under the First Amendment—is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics'.

las corporaciones son personas: ¿qué clase de personas son?

En Citizens United el Supremo de EEUUU, la mayoría protegió el derecho de libre expresión de las corporaciones.

¿Son las corporaciones personas con los mismos derechos que el resto? ¿deben serlo?

La opinión mayoritaria (Kennedy) refuta la distinción entre una persona natural y una corporación a los fines de

proteger su libertad de expresión de la siguiente manera (los énfasis son míos):

"Distinguishing wealthy individuals from corporations based on the latter’s special advantages of, e.g., limited liability, does not suffice to allow laws prohibiting speech. It is irrelevant for First Amendment purposes that corporate funds may “have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” Austin, supra, at 660.

All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech. Under the antidistortion rationale, Congress could also ban political speech of media corporations. Although currently exempt from §441b, they accumulate wealth with the help of their corporate form, may have aggregations of wealth, and may express views “hav[ing] little or no correlation to the public’s support” for those views.

Differential treatment of media corporations and other corporations cannot be squared with the First Amendment, and there is no support for the view that the Amendment’s original meaning would permit suppressing media corporations’ political speech. Austin interferes with the “open marketplace” of ideas protected by the First Amendment. New York State Bd. of Elections v. Lopez Torres, 552 U. S. 196, 208.

Its censorship is vast in its reach, suppressing the speech of both for-profit and nonprofit both small and large, corporations". Pp. 32–40.

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Más allá de lo que dice la mayoría del Supremo,¿Estaría justificada una distinción entre las personas naturales y las corporaciones en tanto personas ficticias?

¿El borrar las líneas jurídicas que establecían la distinción, acarrea, como plantea el editorial del NYT, un golpe a la democracia?