I think you are interpreting "legal personhood" in a manner that is incorrect.<p>"Legal personhood" means that the corporate entity is a legal person in the matter of contracts and lawsuits. The "person" of the corporation is just a facade (in the design patterns sense) which provides useful simplifications in contracts and lawsuits.<p>You could completely replace corporate personhood with contract law. You would just have 10,000 page contracts that would specify the liability of each individual shareholders is limited to X, a lawsuit must target all shareholders and damages/debts are limited to Y, etc. Basically, each contract would reproduce corporate law.<p>Then whenever you wanted to collect a debt or sue the company, you'd need to dig into the contract to figure out how.<p>Instead, we've created a useful simplification/standardization: you say "Company X owes me $50,000", and it's up to Company X to figure out internally how to deal with this. It's also standardized to a few specific forms (LLCs, LLPs, S-Corps, C-corps, etc).<p>That's all corporate personhood is. A corporation has no inherent rights except those rights granted it by it's shareholders. Similarly, your computer has no rights, but that doesn't mean the government can pass a law saying "your computer may not criticize Obama." Such a law doesn't violate your computers rights, it violates <i>your</i> rights.<p>Similarly, laws against political speech violate the rights of the <i>owners</i> of the corporation who are ordinary flesh and blood people (as opposed to legal facades to simplify lawsuits and contracts).