The Civil Rights Movement of American Corporations

Adam Winkler, UCLA professor of law and author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright, 2018), traces the history of corporate rights in the United States, which goes back 200 years before Citizens United.

A listeners asks -- if corporations are like people, can they go to jail the way people can? @adamwinkler says we have held corporations criminally liable for about the past 100+ yrs, but they don't go to prison.

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 8, 2018

@adamwinkler says we do have a corporate death penalty but it's almost never used -- and the way businesses can re-locate, shift their names -- they can magically re-form and reappear somewhere else to get out of it.

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 8, 2018