Lawyers hold this truth to be self-evident: that corporations are endowed with certain constitutional rights. Their constitutional personhood, however, was not deduced from any constitutional document. Constitutional protections began to be extended to corporations by courts in the United States of America at the beginning of the 19th century. Since then, corporations have gained ever more rights, not only property but also liberty rights, such as the freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and the religious liberty. This initially American phenomenon was soon introduced in Europe, and finally into the Slovenian constitutional order as well, where it has been given little theoretical attention. In this dissertation I challenge this self-evident truth by four sets of questions. First, I develop the concept of constitutional personhood as an abstract capacity of a corporation to hold constitutional rights within the framework of the general theory of law. Then, I inquire into the usefulness of corporate personhood theories for determining constitutional claims of corporations. This approach is found to be refuted by legal realists who claim that only independent moral and political theories determine the conditions for assigning constitutional rights. Finally, I analyse the freedom of association as an expression of competing moral theories and a basis for corporate constitutional personhood. By exploring an array of insights from the US, German, French, and Italian legal theory and practice I conclude that there indeed exists a unified rationale of corporate constitutional personhood: one that combines the protection of human dignity of members of human collectivities and the protection of corporations as mediating institutions in a pluralist society.
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