Corporate personhood is a term used to describe the legal fiction used within United States law that a corporation has a limited number or subset of the same constitutional rights as a human being. The choice of the word "person" in "personhood" arises from the way the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was worded and from earlier legal usage of the word "person."

The history of corporate law in the United States can be directly tied to the ebb and flow of the debate first enunciated between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over how centralized the government of the United States should be, how much power the member states should have over their own affairs, and how much say citizens and citizen organizations should have in public affairs. While both Hamilton and Jefferson participated in the creation of the more centralized United States out of the original confederation by the Federalist Party, they had very different ideals as to what the new creation should be. Hamilton believed in a strong central government which he believed necessary for an industrialized nation while Jefferson believed in a de-centralized, more agrarian nation.

It has been argued that the men who wrote the 14th Amendment specifically meant for the word person to be a loophole which you could drive a giant corporation through. Apparently in one of the railroad cases an attorney who had been on the committee that drafted the amendment waved a paper before the court claiming that it documented such; but the paper was not entered as evidence, nor apparently was it shown to anyone, nor was it saved. However, careful research has shown that, John A. Bingham the member of Congress who is known to have been chiefly responsible for the phraseology of Section One when it was drafted by the Joint Committee in 1866, had, during the previous decade and as early as 1856-1859, employed not one but all three of the same clauses and concepts he later used in Section One. More important still, Bingham employed these guarantees specifically and in a context which suggested that free Negroes and mulattoes rather than corporations and business enterprise unquestionably were the 'persons' to which he then referred.

When the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted for approval, the people were not told that the states of the South were to be denied their normal relationship with the Federal Government unless they ratified an amendment granting new and revolutionary rights to corporations. The courts, when the Slaughter House Cases were decided in 1873, had apparently discovered no such purpose. The records of the time can be searched in vain for evidence that this amendment was adopted for the benefit of corporations. It is true (303 U.S. 77, 87) that in 1882, twelve years after its adoption, and ten years after the Slaughter House Cases, supra, an argument was made in the court that a journal of the joint Congressional Committee which framed the amendment, secret and undisclosed up to that date, indicated the committee's desire to protect corporations by the use of the word "person." Four years later, in 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, 6 S.Ct. 1132, decided for the first time that the word "person" in the amendment did in some instances include corporations. A secret purpose on the part of the members of the committee, even if such be the fact, however, would not be sufficient to justify any such construction. The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment followed the freedom of a race from slavery. Justice Swayne said in the Slaughter Houses Cases, supra, that: "By "any person" was meant all persons within the jurisdiction of the State. No distinction is intimated on account of race or color." Corporations have neither race nor color. He knew the amendment was intended to protect the life, liberty, and property of human beings.

A corporate charter is a gift from the people in order to provide a public good. What kind of person is the corporation? They have no soul to save or body to incarcerate. If a person, what is the psychology of that person? They plunder things that are not theirs, rather those of the public commons. They get others to pay the bill for their impact on the environment & society. Their sole focus is generating short term profits for their major investors. By 1997, 51 of the world’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries.