Although the justices never explicitly said so, the court seems to have quietly established that business corporations have religious liberty rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution. If that is right, then Masterpiece Cakeshop could be a groundbreaking decision with profound reverberations in American law.
As cases like Citizens United remind us, business corporations have won an ever-larger number of individual rights under the Constitution. Religious liberty, however, has remained one of the few constitutional rights corporations had not been held to have. (Hobby Lobby held that corporations have religious liberty under a federal statute, which unlike the Constitution could be repealed by ordinary legislation.) Masterpiece Cakeshop subtly extends this right to corporations. And, in time, the case may well be used by many other business corporations whose owners have religious objections to same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, or birth control. [...]
More recently, in cases like Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Peña, the court has allowed business corporations owned by whites to assert they’ve been victims of racial discrimination by affirmative action policies—once more with not a single sentence devoted to explaining why corporations, which have no obvious racial identity, should be able to assert this right. None of this is to say that these decisions are all wrong. But it highlights a pattern of corporations winning rights without the justices giving the question much thought.
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