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On 22 March 2005, the renowned author, educator and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky delivered the third and final lecture of the 2004/2005 Gifford Lecture Series, Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times. The Gifford Lecturers are recognised as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. The Gifford Lectureships were established in 1888. Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) was a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland.

The list of dubious choices made by President Obama during his first two years in office is breathtaking in scope. But nothing he has done - not the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, the appointment to his economic team of the men who'd just helped ruin our economy, nor the billion-dollar gift to the heath insurance industry - is as indefensible as his decision to continue military funding to four countries that utilize child soldiers.

By Ralph Nader & Carl J. Mayer New York Times, April 9, 1988 Our constitutional rights were intended for real persons, not artificial creations. The Framers knew about corporations but chose not to mention these contrived entities in the Constitution. For them, the document shielded living beings from arbitrary government and endowed them with the right to speak, assemble, and petition. Today, however, corporations enjoy virtually the same umbrella of constitutional protections as individuals do. They have become in effect artificial persons with infinitely greater power than humans. This constitutional equivalence must end. Consider a few noxious developments during the last 10 years. A group of large Boston companies invoked the First Amendment in order to spend lavishly and thus successfully defeat a referendum that would have permitted the legislature to enact a progressive income tax that had no direct effect on the property and business of these companies. An Idaho electrical and plumbing corporation cited the Fourth Amendment and deterred a health and safety investigation. A textile supply company used Fifth Amendment protections and barred retrial in a criminal anti-trust case in Texas. The idea that the Constitution should apply to corporations as it applies to humans had its dubious origins in 1886. The Supreme Court said it did "not wish to hear argument" on whether corporations were "persons" protected by the 14th Amendment, a civil rights amendment designed to safeguard newly emancipated blacks from unfair government treatment. It simply decreed that corporations were persons. Now that is judicial activism. A string of later dissents, by Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, demonstrated that neither the history nor the language of the 14th Amendment was meant to protect corporations. But it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle and the corporate evolution into personhood was under way. It was not until the 1970's that corporations