We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

Adam Winkler is the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been featured on CNN and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Republic. A columnist for the Daily Beast, he lives in Los Angeles.

“A work that is both engrossing and surprising....As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in the critical case of whether a business can decline to serve a customer based on its distaste for same-sex marriages, all citizens would do well to pick up a copy of We the Corporations to understand the full implications of what it decides.”
- Jonathan A. Knee, New York Times

“Much of the value of Winkler’s book lies in his elegant stitching together of 400 years of diverse cases, allowing us to feel the sweep and flow of history and the constantly shifting legal approaches to understanding this unusual entity ― Blackstone’s ‘artificial person.’ Four hundred years is a lot of time, and Winkler does a wonderful job of finding illustrative details without drowning in them, and of giving each case enough attention to make it come alive...By nailing down the absurdities of the past, Winkler allows us to see how the future becomes more open.”
- Zephyr Teachout, New York Times Book Review

“Winkler’s deeply engaging legal history, authoritative but accessible to non-lawyers, takes readers inside courtrooms, judges’ chambers and corporate offices... The book offers new takes on familiar stories...as well as fascinating insights from largely forgotten moments... [A] meticulous, educational and thoroughly enjoyable retelling of our nation’s past.”
- Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Washington Post

“'Are corporations people?' That’s the provocative question Winkler poses at the outset of his impressive, engaging new book. . . . [Winkler] begins in Colonial America and provides a forceful and highly readable account of what he convincingly describes as a 'long, and long overlooked, corporate rights movement.'”
- The National Book Review

“An eye-opening account of how corporations became ‘persons’ entitled to constitutional rights and used those rights to impede efforts to regulate them in the interests of real people.”
- David Cole, author of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law

“An incisive account of the unlikely rise of an idea that has nearly turned American politics upside down.”
- Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“This is a brilliant, beautifully written book on a topic affecting almost every area of law: how did corporations come to have rights under the Constitution? Professor Winkler carefully details this history from English law to the present, and the book is filled with new insights and information. Any future discussion of rights for corporations will be shaped by this wonderful book.”
- Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law

“Impressively thorough and wide-ranging. . . . Winkler employs an evocative, fast-paced storytelling style, making for an entertaining and enlightening book that will likely complicate the views of partisans on both sides of the issue.”
- Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A chronicle of the steady, willful process by which corporations became people―until, that is, you try to sue them. . . . Maddening for those who care about matters constitutional and an important document in the ongoing struggle to undo Citizens United.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“[A] timely, exciting book . . . . Constitutional law professor and legal commentator Winkler examines the history of the relationship between corporations and the Constitution, providing a field guide to the legal issues and an overview of a long-term corporate civil rights movement that employs techniques familiar from social justice movements. . . . Along the way, he presents a wide range of vividly drawn historical figures, bringing their philosophies, tactics, debates, and shenanigans to life while allowing readers to assess the ethics and implications of their work.”
- Sara Jorgensen, Booklist