'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'[W]hat you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with, ... the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.'

-- Sonia Sotomayor (above right), posing the question that appears at page 33 of this transcript of the 1st oral argument in which she participated as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Here is audio of the September 9 argument in that campaign spending case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Jess Bravin plumbed the possible implications of her query in this article in the Wall Street Journal (hat tip to SCOTUSblog); he further observed that "Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg" (below left), who evoked the American Declaration of Independence when she said, even earlier in the argument (transcript p. 4):

'A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights.'

Ways that any rethinking of the legal personality of the corporation might affect subfields of international law -- in particular, the field of corporate responsibility -- deserve pondering.

Go On! Right to Identity

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) In some countries in the Americas citizens are denied the right to their identity, and that denial that threatens their civil status from birth to death. Addressing that issue will be a conference entitled "Right to Identity in the Americas: The Role of Civil Society," to be held March 7 at American University's Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law, Washington, D.C. Additional cosponsors are Rights & Democracy, based in Montreal, Canada, and the D.C.-based Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights (of which, I'm proud to say, my former student, Monika Kalra Varma (top right), is director).
Speakers include: our colleague Roxanna Altholz (middle right), Associate Director of the human rights law clinic at the University of California, Berkeley; Sonia Pierre (top left) of El Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana, an NGO in the Dominican Republic; Colette Lespinasse (bottom right) of Le Groupe d'Appui aux Rapatriés et Réfugiés, a Haiti-based NGO; and Dr. Sofia Macher (bottom left), formerly a member of Truth and Reconciliation Committee, representing Instituto de Defensa Legal, an NGO in Peru. Also invited are representatives from the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Can't make it in person? Not a problem. The conference will be webcast at http://wclcenterforhr.org/.