The Corporate Paradox of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby
Two decisions by the United States Supreme Court over the last several years seemed to advance the idea that corporations have some of the attributes of human beings. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 1 the Court ruled that corporations enjoy the same constitutional rights to freedom of speech as do individual people. This means that incorporated businesses may contribute unlimited amounts of money to political organizations in order to promote certain points of view. A few years later, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 2 the Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act exempted some closely held corporations from a requirement of the Affordable Care Act that contradicted the religious beliefs of the shareholders of those corporations. Plainly, these two decisions share at least one common theme: they recognize rights in for-profit corporations that have traditionally been thought of as belonging only to individuals, political entities, or religious organizations. As such, many commentators have viewed Citizens United and Hobby Lobby as evidence of the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to cede power to corporations at the expense of the rights of individuals and other stakeholders.3
Despite this apparent recognition that corporations can behave like human beings and have some of the same rights commensurate with that status, the two decisions in fact offer very different, and indeed irreconcilable, visions of the American corporation. Citizens United embodies the view that corporations are run by boards of directors and managers whose pursuit of profit trumps the nonmonetary values of other stakeholders, including society, employees, the environment, and the shareholders themselves. In protecting the right of corporate managers to make political donations that do not necessarily reflect the opinions of shareholders, Citizens United affirmed both the primacy of management over shareholders and the profit motive as central aspects of corporate governance and behavior. In contrast, Hobby Lobby does much the opposite. Hobby Lobby makes plain that corporations can pursue ends in conflict with the goal of monetary profit.4 Further, the decision seems to place the personal beliefs and interests of the shareholders above those of any other stakeholders. Indeed, these two aspects of the decision appear to be antithetical to the management-primacy and monetary-profit based vision of Citizens United. 5
