in the U.S. sovereignty for each natural person is based on sovereignty to a principle higher than the law. This is why corporations being declared a "legal person" in the U.S. is the epitome of corruption. The Supreme Court judge Marshall dissent ruled that U.S. sovereignty is based on a higher principle than the U.S. constitution.
"Is the State a person? Yes, in just the same way that a corporation is a person. But, it may be said, that corporate personality is a fiction and if the personality of the state is no more, it is a fiction. The idea of corporate personality is of ecclesiastical court, not Roman law, origin, and is traceable to Pope Innocent IV. He took the position that a corporation had rights but no duties, because it could not sin, and until corporations and states could sin he refused to admit that they could be real persons....In the same way that the corporation is a person the State is a person. When it is once realized that the thing which gives a corporation personality is not the act of incorporation so much as the other facts incident to its existence, it is easy to realize that other group-units, including the State, may have a personality. The "personification of the State before the law is as real and tangible as that of the corporation." ....Is the State sovereign? Showing that the State is a person does not show that the State is sovereign, any more than showing that it is not a person would show that it is not sovereign."......."If, however, sovereignty is defined not as external but as the internal power to delimit personal liberty by social control, or protect it against social control, there is such a thing as. sovereignty. "..."But the true answer is that neither the states nor the federal government is sovereign." ....
"Who, then, in the United States is sovereign? It is the people. The people, not as Rousseau suggested without determinate forms for the exercise of sovereignty; not as citizens of the United States nor as citizens of the various states: but the whole people as organized in government to express and adjust their will either directly or through representatives. ...This power of revolution substantiates the doctrine that the people are sovereign, "....."Just as the colonies were not sovereign, though given almost complete autonomy, because the mother country still had the power of control, so neither the nation nor the states are sovereign because the people have the power of control. By the people is meant -the people as a whole, and not the people of the various states, because in the last anal- ysis the people of any particular state may have their social control dictated by the people of other states."....."the subverted sovereignty was acquired by the whole people, not as individuals, but as a community, or society, or group bound together first by the principles of solidarity and then by the political organizations which they adopted. "...James Wilson, speaking in the Constitutional Convention, said: "My position is that the sovereignty resides in the people * * * the people at large * * *. "..........Dewey, "government is an organ of sovereignty, not sovereignty itself * * *. The forces which determine the government (the effective social forces) are sovereign * * ** "............But probably the truth of popular sovereignty was best expressed by Abraham Lincoln when he called our government "a government of the people, for the people, by the people." ...Supreme Court Justice Marshall said that the United States Constitution emanated from the people and not from sovereign states and that the general government's powers were not delegated to it by the states but by the people;"..."It follows, therefore, both by principle and by authority, that under the United States Constitution, the doctrine of sovereignty in the United States is that doctrine which defines sovereignty...[as] the power to delimit personal liberty by social control or to protect personal liberty against social control; and which makes this power reside not in the organs of government, nor the Constitution, nor Divine Law, nor even in the states or nation (although all of these are juristic personalities), but in the people as a whole as organized at present in our dual form of government."
1929 The Doctrine of Sovereignty Under the United States Constitution Hugh Evander WillisIndiana University School of Law - Bloomington
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0151-3
the ‘people as a sovereign body’ serves to protect against violations of individual liberty
Given this intricate theoretical framework, as well as the complexity of the notion of a sovereign people (Butler, 2016; Morgan, 1988; Morris, 2000), we stress that whatever its scope, the sovereign people plays a protective role with regard to citizens’ liberties in general and against despotic power in particular (Locke, 1679 (1960); Kant, 1793 (1977)). Locke, (1679 (1960)) and Kant, (1793 ([1977)) assume that the sovereign people guarantees individual liberty in any human association. Both thinkers hold both that human associations (or societies) of free persons cannot deny the political facts of power, obedience and command (Locke, 1679 ([1960); Kant, 1793 (1977)) and that, in natural (rather than political) conditions, individual liberty is unrestricted.
For these reasons, personal and institutional liberal and democratic sovereignty is more than a childish claim to state protection against political irresponsibility and blindness to public contributions to individual private well-being. It is a claim to one’s own political responsibility, for oneself and others, as this claim is clearly formulated in Locke’s and Kant’s political philosophies.
These include public laws based on the will of the people that provide each person with a unique set of liberties with regard to the use of material goods which impose on each a unique set of restrictions. These liberties and restrictions will ensure that individuals have an equal coercive power to prevent their becoming servile persons and, correlatively, to prevent any one of them from becoming a despotic lord. They also require the assumption of the cooperative nature of individual well-being, and therefore the pursuit of social justice with regards to the fruits of that cooperation.
In comparing neoliberalism to Locke and Kant’s political philosophies, we have shown how the protective role of the people is compatible with individual liberty. Since it requires an equal right of coercion, it allows for the protection of individual liberty.
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