How is Understanding the Founders True Intent Currently Being Ignored?

Question

In law, words are the company they keep, or Noscitur a Sociis. When referring by context of law the word "inhabitant" can mean another individual, but not necessarily you. Example: The context of the word "person" as defined in the 1755 Samuel Johnson Dictionary (1755) means only " a living, breathing, thinking being." But if you look the word "person" up in a Blacks Law 1st Ed.100 years later it includes corporations, and other non-living entities.

If the Founders intent is essential, that intent can only be found by utilizing the dictionary they used when writing the Constitution. To change the meaning of any word in the Constitution, can drastically alter the Founders true intent. Certainly,under their dictum, a corporation was not a person.

Answer 1

The prevailing originalist methodologies today focus on original public meaning

You present the hypothetical:

If the Founders intent is essential...

But it isn't, according to the predominant modern strands of originalism. The prevailing originalist approach is focused on original public meaning, not original intent.

Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner wrote, in Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012) (emphasis in original):

It is the one that we espouse: original meaning, as opposed to original intention (which devolves into trying to read the minds of enactors or ratifiers). This brand of originalism — as opposed to the search for historical intent, which we renounce — holds sway with many respected scholars today.

Dictionaries can be relevant but they are not the end or even necessarily the starting point of the analysis

You go on to say:

that intent can only be found by utilizing the dictionary they used when writing the Constitution.

Dictionaries are relevant but not the only source, and meaning is contextual. See William Baude & Jud Campbell, "Early American Constitutional History: A Source Guide", listing dictionaries as one of many sources that inform original public meaning.

He notes:

Dictionaries are a tempting source for easy citations, but they should be used with delicacy. Most English speakers do not learn English from a dictionary, nor do they routinely use dictionaries before deciding what to say. Instead, dictionaries are more useful as descriptive accounts of how contemporary speakers tend to use particular words.

And Scalia and Garner say:

Most common English words have a number of dictionary definitions, some of them quite abstruse and rarely intended. One should assume the contextually appropriate ordinary meaning unless there is reason to think otherwise. Sometimes there is reason to think otherwise, which ordinarily comes from context. And it should not be forgotten that not all colloquial meanings appropriate to particular contexts are to be found in the dictionary.

Answer 2

First, it is false that "intent can only be found by utilizing the dictionary they used when writing the Constitution", in fact intent can rarely be discerned by appealing to a dictionary. A better textual source is "their writings". Second, "original intent" is only one of many ideologies underlying the interpretation.

The connection between corporations and the word "person" is made because a corporation is an arrangement of some sort between natural persons. It is uncontroversial that two individuals have a constitutionally protected right to form a contract. The same protected right to form contract is recognized via case law (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 US 518), and that the charter of the college is not a relation between the government and its citizens, it is between individuals (in this case, one individual, The King, and a group of individuals).

Corporate personhood is judged on a clause-by-clause basis, always reducing to seeing (or denying) that in the particular case the corporation is (not) exercising a right on behalf of natural persons. Your own property interests and the right to a day in court to protect those rights is not diminished by dint of the interest being expressed via a collective corporate action (such as "baking and selling loaves of bread"). There are many rights of natural persons which do not extend to corporations, for example there is no 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The Privileges and Immunities Clause does not extend to corporations.

It was clearly the intent of the Founders that the rights of natural persons to form contracts should not be impaired by the government, and that a person has a right to their day in court, and that is exactly what corporate-personhood doctrine recognizes – the government cannot obliterate an individual right because it is being exercised via a particular kind of agreement.