Did the Framers of the constitution intend that a corporation be Research Paper

Did the Framers of the constitution intend that a corporation be classified as a person for the purpose of being sued and suing - Research Paper Example 208). Persons, according to Roman law, do not have any kind of existence outside that of the legal sphere, and the law recognizes entities, regardless of whether or not they have a biological status. This view is called the â€Å"fiction theory† – this means that the personality of a corporation is a fiction, and that the corporation owes its very existence to the state (French, 1979, p. 208). Rivaling this theory in American jurisprudence is that of the â€Å"Legal Aggregate Theory of the Corporation† – this means that the corporate body is a shield or an umbrella for the individual persons that make up that corporation. In this theory, biological status is what matters, and has legal priority. In this theory, the corporation is synonymous with the board of directors and other leaders of the companies, while employees are generally ignored (French, 1979, p. 209). Another competing theory is that of the Germans, who regard corporations as having a de jarte personality, â€Å"which the law only declares to be a judicial fact† (French, 1979, p. 209). ... What is needed is a Reality Theory that identifies a de facto metaphysical person not just a sociological entity† (French, 1979, p. 210) While these are the popular theories about corporate personhood, the focus of this paper is whether or not the Framers meant for a corporation to be considered a person for the purposes of suing and being sued is a question that has a confused answer. The answer is confused because Supreme Court decisions have contradictory analysis on whether or not a corporation is considered to be a person under the Constitution as written. One case indicated that a corporation can sue in its own name, but that the corporation itself is not a citizen, but, rather, is composed of individual citizens, and that these individual citizens are what a court must look to when deciding if a court has jurisdiction over corporation lawsuits. Another case says, no, a corporation is an entity of its own, and the individual members of the corporation are not what matters – what matters is the corporation itself. The differences between these two cases is that the former was a case involving corporate lawsuits and the latter involved a corporation’s ability to make contracts. Then along came a case whose dicta established that a corporation is a person, but did not give any kind of reasoning behind why it believes this to be so. Nevertheless, this is considered to be a landmark case in that the case affirmatively established that a corporation is indeed a person. But, since the reasoning behind this is unclear, it is likewise unclear as to whether this court decided that the Framers intended this to be so. In other words, the Supreme Court cases that have dealt with the issue of corporate personhood,