Boston University Law Review Online
Corporate Personhood and the History of the Rights of Corporations: A Reflection on Adam Winkler’s Book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Jack M. Beermann
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 32 (2018)
Adam Winkler’s book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights is an impressive work on several different levels. Because so much of the development of American constitutional law over the centuries has involved businesses, the book is a nearly comprehensive legal history of federal constitutional law […]
Corporate Rights as Subplot
Larry Yackle
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 36 (2018)
Adam Winkler makes an important contribution to the great body of academic work on corporations in American life. He concentrates on a small corner of the larger topic. He traces only the development of corporate “rights,” and he describes, but does not critique, what he uncovers […]
Corporate Constitutional Rights: Easy and Hard Cases
Kent Greenfield
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 40 (2018)
Adam Winkler has written one of the most important books of legal history of the last decade. The story of corporate constitutional rights is as long as our nation’s history, yet few have plumbed it like Winkler does. We the Corporations is a brilliant work—beautifully written and exhaustively researched […]
Wrong Turns with Corporate Rights
Elizabeth Pollman
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 44 (2018)
For over two centuries, the Supreme Court has heard corporations’ claims for rights under the U.S. Constitution. A growing body of legal literature has examined in scholarly detail the contours of this jurisprudence and the history of corporate rights. Yet there is something important and different about giving this case law and cast of historical actors the space to breathe over the length of a book […]
The Eschatological Drift of Corporate Constitutional Rights: A Review of Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations
Tamara Piety
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 49 (2018)
It is often said that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. The idea is that although the profit motive may drive prosperity, unless it is retrained by some outside force, it may also be an inherently destructive force. This may also be true of a society in which the profit motive and private industry have created an economy that is dependent upon many practices inconsistent with long term human survival; yet we seem helpless to reform those practices […]
Is Constitutional Doctrine the Source of Corporate Rights?
Michael C. Dorf
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. 59 (2018)
We the Corporations, Adam Winkler’s terrific history of the constitutional rights of corporations in America, does not have a surprise ending, but it does have what many readers will probably experience as a surprise beginning. Corporations, the reader learns, did not co-opt the language of the Constitution and civil rights for their nefarious purposes—not recently, nor even in the Gilded Age […]
The Long History of Corporate Rights
Adam Winkler
Online Symposium: Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
98 B.U. L. Rev. 64 (2018)
Corporations have been fighting for equal rights since America’s earliest days. AlthoughCitizens United v. Federal Election Commissionfirst drew broad public attention to the rights of corporations under the Constitution, businesses have quietly amassed a remarkable track record of success in the Supreme Court over the course of the past two centuries […]
Hope and Fear for Democracy in America
Daniel Markovits
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 1 (2018)
The familiar saying “money is power” carries two meanings: one is common in the United States today; the other less so. The common meaning asserts that money buys power and therefore that economic inequality tends towards, or causes, political inequality. According to this idea, the rich can use their income and wealth to pay lobbyists […]
Reconstructing Democracy in an Era of Inequality
K. Sabeel Rahman
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 5 (2018)
Sitaraman’s book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, is the latest in a larger set of scholarly re-engagements with the theme of “law and political economy” (“LPE”). First, scholars in this vein have taken a number of overlapping approaches: recovering historical traditions of normative, legal, and constitutional thought around economic inclusion, opportunity, and democracy […]
Ganesh Sitaraman’s Idealized American History
David Lyons
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 11 (2018)
A popular theme among patriots is to celebrate America’s special virtues, which distinguish it radically from European models. Ganesh Sitaraman tells us that political constitutions have generally been designed to prevent socially destabilizing class warfare between the rich, who seek greater domination, and the poor, who would like to redistribute the former’s wealth. America’s Constitution […]
Sitaraman’s Mistaken Case for the Middle-Class Constitution
Richard A. Epstein
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 15 (2018)
Vanderbilt Law School Professor Ganesh Sitaraman, a close friend and former advisor of Senator Elizabeth Warren, does not pull his punches. By his title, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, Sitaraman proclaims two themes that dominate his book. He writes, “the number one threat to American constitutional government today […]
Why Growing Government is a Greater Political Menace than Growing Inequality
Ilya Somin
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 21 (2018)
In his important new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that growing economic inequality over the last several decades and the resulting decline of the middle class is “the number one threat to American constitutional government.” He also contends that the American Founding Fathers sought to establish a “middle-class constitution” in […]
The Middle-Class Constitution: A Response
Ganesh Sitaraman
Online Symposium: Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 27 (2018)
I am very grateful to the Boston University Law Review for bringing together such a terrific group of scholars to engage with my book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. It is a testament to the work and excellence of the Boston University Law Review that they pulled together […]