“ARE CORPORATIONS PEOPLE?” IS NOT THE RIGHT QUESTION: At SSRN, my review of Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.

As the review details, the book has its pluses and minuses, but establishes a fact that many readers, especially on the left, will find surprising and counter-intuitive: when courts hold that corporations are “people” for constitutional purposes, they generally do so to limit corporate rights. In Citizens United and other cases in which corporations’ constitutional rights have been established, the Court is protecting the rights of the corporations’ human owners, not the corporation itself.

Bonus factoid: The supposedly “reactionary” pre-New Deal “Lochner Court” tried to limit corporations’ ability to assert constitutional rights, but the “liberal” New Deal Court, keen to broaden first amendment protections for corporate-owned newspapers, expanded them.

[Bumped because the link mysteriously disappeared from the original posting]