We the Corporations: A Conversation with Adam Winkler

Join ACS Columbia for a conversation with Professor Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. 

We the Corporations chronicles the astonishing story of one of the most successful yet least well-known “civil rights movements” in American history. Although never oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations too have fought to win equal rights under the Constitution—and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. Uncovering the roots of Citizens United, Adam Winkler shows how that controversial Supreme Court decision was the capstone of a two-hundred-year struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business. Bringing to life the legendary lawyers and justices involved in the dramatic yet often overlooked cases that extended our most fundamental rights to corporations—Daniel Webster, Louis Brandeis, Stephen Field, and even Thurgood Marshall—We the Corporations reveals how the nation’s most powerful companies transformed the Constitution into a bulwark against the regulation of big business and a tool to serve the ends of capital. 

Join Professor Winkler for a half-hour presentation with a Q&A. Lunch will be served.