So, ARE Corporations Really People Too? feat. Adam Winkler

Jul 27, 2022

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It was August 2011 when Mitt Romney famously told a crowd at the Iowa State Fair, "corporations are people, my friend." Corporations have had what you could call a civil rights history of their own, which has gone on in parallel to all other civil rights movements. But with so much knowledge in this field publicly available to us, how could this entire history be so poorly understood?

This is highlighted in Adam Winker’s work, and most recently his book, “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Right.”

Professor Adam Winkler is a specialist in American constitutional law, the Supreme Court, and gun policy, as well as the Connell Professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. He is also the author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

Greg and Adam discuss this question among others, while also analyzing landmark cases in the flights of Corporations including Citizens United v. FEC, Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.

Episode Quotes:

The Supreme Court case that shaped our view on corporations

In the Dartmouth College case, the Supreme Court firmly sided with the idea that a corporation was more like a person, an individual than it was like the government. The court, in that case, could have allowed the state of New Hampshire to take over Dartmouth College and said that a corporation is really just another state agency in some form or some mild form of a state agency or government actor. But instead, the court said that the corporation was on the private side, more like the individual, and had rights against the government. And so that decision was really essential in sort of changing how we started to think about corporations and they became less and less about achieving public purposes and more and more about achieving private purposes. That is to say, making money for investors.

Corporations have racial identities

"…we don't think of corporations necessarily as being black or white or whatnot, but the law treats them in such a way. We have laws that provide, for instance, various kinds of preferences, affirmative action, if you will, for minority business enterprises. Well, what is a minority business enterprise, other than a corporation that has been deemed to have a racial identity."

Why focus on corporate issues

Corporations have not all of the same rights as you and me, but nearly all the same rights as you and me. And pretty much all of the rights that a corporation or a business person could want the corporation to have. And so, I realized that this was a story that hadn't been well told, and as I dug into it, I found that it was a much more interesting, unexpected, surprising, and fascinating history than I could have ever imagined.

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Faculty Profile at UCLA Law
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Adam Winkler on PBS NewsHour

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