Responsible Behavior after Hobby Lobby, An Open Sermon to Corporate Persons

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, decided June of 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that business entities, including certain for-profit corporations, are capable of expressing religious beliefs, potentially allowing them to avoid the operation of federal laws of general applicably that they sincerely find inconsistent with such beliefs. A host of observers and scholars are appalled that corporations have garnered parity of rights with natural persons, and they warn that personalization has made possible for corporations to avoid the responsibilities of good citizenship and ultimately to assert their “Declaration of Independence” from the authority of the people. Government regulation of corporations have manifestly failed, and what is needed now is to move away from the restraint of the corporate entity, which is of dubious value, and place the blame squarely where it lies, within the human condition. The dualistic nature of humans is deterministic of the output of human invention, and it may be that corporations are more rational and more capable than persons in doing good. Rather than being subject to additional prohibitions to further tie their hands, corporate managers must be empowered to put corporate financial resources into good use. It is time to abandon the purely economic discretionary model of corporate decision making and the shareholder primacy model of corporate management and to adopt models which are more inclusive of the interests of the many stakeholders of the modern corporation, including employees, consumers and communities. This paper suggests that Hobby Lobby may be a testament to human ingenuity and an outstanding milestone in the long-anticipated fulfillment of the prophetic goal of corporation law, provided that along with its emancipation, the corporation is empowered to moderate its new and erstwhile acquired rights with the dictates of good citizenship and ethical behavior in the form of corporate responsibility.