IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijcrac/v4y2012i3p265-271.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The role of accounting in the corporate personhood debate

Author

Listed:
  • Bob Peace

Abstract

A recent US Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee affirmed the treatment of corporations as persons under the law. This interpretation of the Constitution provides corporations with the same freedoms that protect individual citizens. Of most importance is the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. This decision allows corporations to exercise their substantial financial power, as political power, to influence elections. The court's opinion also offers corporations a constitutional shield against unannounced searches under the Fourth Amendment. This means that health and safety inspections of corporate property must be done pursuant to a court authorised warrant. International accounting firms owe much of their existence and success to business corporations. As a consequence, accounting firms, through their affiliation with lobbying concerns and friend of the court brief advocates, appear to have exerted an influence on this issue with the courts.

Suggested Citation

  • Bob Peace, 2012. "The role of accounting in the corporate personhood debate," International Journal of Critical Accounting, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 4(3), pages 265-271.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijcrac:v:4:y:2012:i:3:p:265-271
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=47363
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijcrac:v:4:y:2012:i:3:p:265-271. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=328 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.