Adam Winkler

We the Corporations chronicles the astonishing story of one of the most successful yet least well-known "civil rights movements" in American history. Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation's earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution--and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. Exposing the historical origins of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, Adam Winkler explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business. Beginning his account in the colonial era, Winkler reveals the profound influence corporations had on the birth of democracy and on the shape of the Constitution itself. Once the Constitution was ratified, corporations quickly sought to gain the rights it guaranteed. The first Supreme Court case on the rights of corporations was decided in 1809, a half-century before the first comparable cases on the rights of African Americans or women. Ever since, corporations have waged a persistent and remarkably fruitful campaign to win an ever-greater share of individual rights. Although corporations never marched on Washington, they employed many of the same strategies of more familiar civil rights struggles: civil disobedience, test cases, and novel legal claims made in a purposeful effort to reshape the law. Indeed, corporations have often been unheralded innovators in constitutional law, and several of the individual rights Americans hold most dear were first secured in lawsuits brought by businesses. Winkler enlivens his narrative with a flair for storytelling and a colorful cast of characters: among others, Daniel Webster, America's greatest advocate, who argued some of the earliest corporate rights cases on behalf of his business clients; Roger Taney, the reviled Chief Justice, who surprisingly fought to limit protections for corporations--in part to protect slavery; and Roscoe Conkling, a renowned politician who deceived the Supreme Court in a brazen effort to win for corporations the rights added to the Constitution for the freed slaves. Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, Ralph Nader, Louis Brandeis, and even Thurgood Marshall all played starring roles in the story of the corporate rights movement. In this heated political age, nothing can be timelier than Winkler's tour de force, which shows how America's most powerful corporations won our most fundamental rights and turned the Constitution into a weapon to impede the regulation of big business.

How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

We the Corporations

Adam Winkler's groundbreaking new work chronicles the story of America's political battles over gun control, and how, like abortion and health care, the heated gun controversy illustrates the increasing political divide between liberals and conservatives, between the concerns of urban residents and the cries of rural activists. Using the Supreme Court's landmark case, District of Columbia v. Heller - in which the 2008 ruling invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital - as a launching pad, Winkler, a prominent law professor and Daily Beast columnist, models his overarching narrative after Anthony Lewis's classic Gideon's Trumpet. Winkler demonstrates that the Supreme Court case proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the plaintiff, Alan Gura, for while he was successful in challenging the D. C. handgun prohibition, the gun lobbyists lost a bigger struggle: their war to end gun control in America. Shuttling back and forth in history - examining post-Civil War prohibitions against blacks owning guns, FDR's first attempt to impose gun control legislation, or Ronald Reagan's (a Republican!) advocacy of gun control - Winkler reveals that guns have increasingly become the Rosetta Stone of American politics, and that no single issue reveals more about how America has tilted towards the right in the last 50 years. This potentially prize-winning work by an uncommonly gifted legal scholar, ultimately explores the political, social, and legal issues that have so fiercely divided a nation.

Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America

Leonard Williams Levy

Kenneth L. Karst

Provides an alphabetized and cross-referenced chronology of the history and content of the American Constitution from its creation and ratification, through case-by-case coverage of 200 years of interpretations.

Encyclopedia of the American Constitution

A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (Washington Post). In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business. Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.

Adam Winkler

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