To show a well-founded fear of persecution, an alien need not prove that it is more likely than not that he or she will be persecuted in his or her home country.

Although it may not be a castle, [it is the] functional equivalent of a hotel room, a vacation and retirement home or a hunting and fishing cabin.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

To show a well-founded fear of persecution, an alien need not prove that it is more likely than not that he or she will be persecuted in his or her home country.

A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.

It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

Requiring that an execution be relatively painless...actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.