Corporate personhood in the context of "Juridical person"

A company is a legal entity that represents an association of legal persons with a specific, shared objective, such as the earning of profit or the benefit of society. Depending on jurisdiction, companies can take on various forms, such as voluntary associations, nonprofit organizations, business entities, financial entities, banks, and educational institutions. Across jurisdictions, companies have generally evolved to have certain common legal features, including separate legal personality, limited liability, transferable shares, investor ownership, and a managerial hierarchy.

Depending on jurisdiction, the term "company" may or may not be synonymous with corporation, partnership, firm and society. Companies are governed by company law, which is also known as corporate law in some jurisdictions. Incorporated companies are created by and registered with the state, whereas unincorporated companies are not.

Personhood is the status of having outstanding moral worth. Yet the specific criteria that qualify someone as a person are controversial. In the West, personhood tends to be defined in terms of "sophisticated cognitive capacities;" yet, in other societies, such as sub-Saharan Africa, personhood is more often understood as a relational process. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.

Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood, and the beginning of human personhood. In the 21st century, corporate personhood is an existing Western concept; granting non-human entities personhood, which has also been referred to a "personhood movement", can bridge Western and Indigenous legal systems.

Piercing the corporate veil or lifting the corporate veil is a legal decision to treat the rights or duties of a corporation as the rights or liabilities of its shareholders. Usually a corporation is treated as a separate legal person, which is solely responsible for the debts it incurs and the sole beneficiary of the credit it is owed. Common law countries usually uphold this principle of separate personhood, but in exceptional situations may "pierce" or "lift" the corporate veil.

A simple example would be where a businessperson has left their job as a director and has signed a contract to not compete with the company they have just left for a period of time. If they set up a company which competed with their former company, technically it would be the company and not the person competing. But it is likely a court would say that the new company was just a "sham" or a "cover" and that, as the new company is completely owned and controlled by one person, the former employee is deliberately choosing to compete, placing them in breach of that non-competing contract.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court regarding campaign finance laws, in which the Court found that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court's 5–4 ruling in favor of Citizens United sparked significant controversy, with some viewing it as a defense of American principles of free speech and a safeguard against government overreach, and others criticizing it for reaffirming the longstanding principle of corporate personhood, and for allowing large corporations to wield disproportionate political power.

The majority opinion, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that the prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act violated the First Amendment. The ruling barred restrictions on corporations, unions, and nonprofit organizations from independent expenditures, allowing groups to independently support political candidates with financial resources. In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people."