Legal Personhood Quotes

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.

I think corporations are a whole lot different than people. I mean, I don't know a corporation would be put in prison. I do know people would be put in prison.

I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through statute.

In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

Corporations cannot commit treason, or be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.

the Law has made the man and wife one person, and that one person the husband!

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

They may want to insist that corporations are people but corporations are certainly not Americans.

It cannot be said that the Constitution formed 'the people of the United States,' for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of 'the people' as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not describe itself as 'we,' nor as 'people,' nor as 'ourselves.' Nor does a corporation, in legal language, have any 'posterity.'

If anything is due to a corporation, it is not due to the individual members thereof, nor do the members individually owe what the corporation owes.

There is nobody that I know who believes that Bank of America is a human being who should be entitled for the same constitutional rights that the people of our country are.

Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the 'right' of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the 'property rights' of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State.

It's crazy that the Constitution has to be amended to clarify what for the majority of Americans is a clear and true statement: corporations are not people.

Here in the United States, corporations has human rights. And then why not - why not nature also, if corporations can defend themselves, saying, 'We have human rights?' Well, let's admit that nature also should be protected.

This is a crucial time in the fight for corporate civil rights. Just look at the hateful signs at Occupy Wallstreet: 'Corporations Are Not People!' Wow, I thought we were past the point in this country where some people aren't people just because they have different color skin or different religion or were born in a lawyer's office, only exist on paper, have no soul and can never die.

A corporation, we have held, is not a "citizen," within the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause … But a corporation is a "person" within the meaning of the equal protection and due process of law clauses.

The controversy between rule of law and rule of men was never relevant to women because, along with juveniles, imbeciles, and other classes of legal nonpersons, they had no access to law except through men.

If we hewed to the notion that an embryo achieves personhood when sperm meets egg, we’d have to investigate all miscarriages as potential homicides, perhaps punishable by death.

The legal theory is, that marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband.

Constitutionally I don't exist.

Supreme Court opinion notwithstanding, corporations are not defined as people under the Constitution, and free speech can hardly be called free when only the rich are heard.

By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage.