All general business corporation statues appear to date from well after 1800.. The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans they had in mind.
The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it…. Unlike natural persons, corporations have ‘limited liability’ for their owners and managers, ‘perpetual life,’ separation of ownership and control, ‘and favorable treatment of the accumulation of assets….’ Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled.
...It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

A judicial coup in 1886... determined that corporations were persons, for the purpose of the Constitution. ...[T]he Constitution doesn't even have the word company, corporate, or political party in it. So why are we ruled by them? You see the distortion? The only persons recognized in the Constitution are real people. It starts... with "We the People" not "we the corporations."

Thanks to a century and a half of truly bizarre Supreme Court decisions (never bills passed by the elected legislature)... today's new corporate "person" is... endowed with many of the rights and protections of human beings. The modern corporation... can live forever, doesn't fear prison, and can't be executed if found guilty... It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new "persons", can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residences in many different nations. ...Nonetheless, today a corporation gets many of the constitutional protections America's founders gave humans ...

We should drop the bizarre American fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech. Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates. As the legal historian Zephyr Teachout has observed, the founders would have considered corporate campaign spending the essence of political corruption.

Corporations are people, my friend … course they are!

Many critics of Citizens United believe that corporations have the same rights as individuals because the Supreme Court defines them as people. The proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United is based on this idea... Yet corporate personhood has played only a secondary role in the corporate rights movement. ...[J]ustices have more often relied upon a very different conception... an association capable of asserting the rights of its members. This... has paved the way for the steady expansion of corporate rights. Indeed, corporate personhood has traditionally—and surprisingly—been used to justify limits on the rights of corporations.

No legislature, governor, or president has ever suggested that corporations should be considered "persons" for the purpose of Constitutional protections, particularly under the 14th Amendment's equal-protection rights.

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.

Despite the fact that corporations have never been subjected to systematic opression like women and minorities... today corporations have nearly the same rights as individuals... a considerable share of the Constitution's most fundamental protections.

Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and Exxon or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded.

The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

There is a movement to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. When the US Supreme Court clerk, who was the former president of a railroad, announced that the corporations are people for purposes of defending their property... That makes sense, because a corporation is property. But Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a dissent in a case called Bellotti vs. ...Bank of Boston, was clearly opposed to the idea of giving political rights to corporations. We are now on the verge, in the Hobby Lobby case, of giving religious rights to corporations. Who's a corporation prey to, Mammon? So we've very much veered off from what was intended.

The corporation as an organizational form is an enormously productive social invention. Partly because of its success it is under increasing attack from various quarters, often under the guise of “protecting” investors from self-interested managers. Some of these attacks are successful simply because the corporation is a poorly understood entity. This paper discusses what the corporation is, what it is not, and how certain misconceptions about the corporate form are fostered by its critics as part of their attack.