Apple has announced it will fight a court order requiring it to develop a custom version of its iOS operating system so the FBI can hack into an iPhone that belonged to one of the terrorists who shot and killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California last year. We don't know exactly what legal claims Apple will raise, but some speculate that Apple may argue that the order violates the Constitution. And that's where things get interesting.

Apple Inc. is a corporation – an artificial legal entity that exists because of a charter granted under the laws of California. Corporations are not people, and they shouldn't be treated as if they have constitutional rights like living, breathing people.

But that doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a good case. It just needs to rely on an ancient legal doctrine with a Latin name and a 40-year-old precedent involving beer sales. Let's step back and consider Apple's possible constitutional arguments.

First, some suggest that forcing Apple to write new software is unconstitutional compelled speech. Many laws require corporations to produce written reports that they'd rather not produce, whether it's mandatory disclosures to stock investors or pollution discharge reports under the Clean Water Act. But these aren't First Amendment violations. The First Amendment's purpose is to protect democratic self-government and expressive autonomy, and neither is implicated here. To be sure, in recent years corporations have managed to persuade courts that everything from milk-labeling requirements to securities disclosure laws are unconstitutional compelled speech. But a court order requiring a software corporation to develop a slightly different version of its software as part of a criminal investigation isn't much different from a subpoena ordering a witness to testify, and that power of the courts doesn't infringe freedom of speech.

Second, the American Civil Liberties Union has suggested that Apple may also have a claim under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause, which says that no "person" can be deprived of "liberty" without "due process of law." Even for those who claim that the word "person" means "corporation," this is a weak argument. Corporations don't have "liberty," and the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the due process clause protects "the liberty of natural, not artificial, persons." As for "due process of law," the FBI went to a judge and got a court order, which Apple is now challenging in court. How much more legal process does Apple think it's due?

That leaves the Fourth Amendment, which provides that "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." According to pundits, Apple may argue that forcing it to break encryption might be an "unreasonable" search.

But let's unpack the Fourth Amendment argument. The question here is whose Fourth Amendment rights are at stake. Apple's claim as a corporation is very weak. The Fourth Amendment applies, in its own words, to "the people." And as the Supreme Court has recognized, "corporations can claim no equality with individuals in the enjoyment of a right to privacy. They are endowed with public attributes. They have a collective impact upon society, from which they derive the privilege of acting as artificial entities." We shouldn't conflate the privacy of "the people" in "their persons, houses, papers, and effects" with the business operations of a multinational corporation.

But there's someone who does have a right to privacy at issue here: Apple's customers. The government's demand here could both create a broader vulnerability in iOS and set a precedent for allowing the government to require backdoors in general. Unfortunately, customers whose privacy might be at stake can't easily come into court to challenge the order.

That's where the ancient legal doctrine known as jus tertii (in English, third-party standing) comes in. Usually, when you go to court, you have to argue your own rights, not someone else's, were violated. But under jus tertii, sometimes X can go into court and argue that Y's rights are at stake. Courts don't always allow these claims – there's a four-part test – but there are legitimate circumstances, and this might be one.

The classic jus tertii case involved an Oklahoma law that set different drinking ages for males (21) and females (18). The question was whether the law unconstitutionally discriminated against young men on the basis of sex. But the plaintiff in the Supreme Court wasn't a 19- or 20-year-old man. Rather, the court allowed the case to be argued by a (female) beer vendor. The beer vendor hadn't been discriminated against at all, but her male customers had, and she came into court and argued a sex-discrimination claim on their behalf. And she won!

When corporations claim constitutional rights, ask whether the rights of any actual people are at stake. Treating the artificial legal entity itself as having constitutional rights leads to bizarre results, like the theory that a publicly traded corporation has a constitutional right not to disclose information about its own products to investors.