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Corporations and the Constitution
Our Constitution never uses the term “corporations,” referring instead to protections for “persons,” “the people,” and “citizens.” Yet in recent years, the Supreme Court has in several areas given corporations more protection than individuals. If anything, it should be the opposite, and CAC shows through text and history how the Constitution demands more protection for people than corporations.
Think Tank
On January 20, 2012, CAC published Reversing Citizens United: Lessons from the Sixteenth Amendment. Released to coincide with the two-year anniversary of Citizens United, this Issue Brief tells the story of the how progressives in the early 20th Century amended the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1895 decision in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust, a 5-4 ruling that struck down a federal income tax law and, much like Citizens United, departed from first constitutional principles and a long line of precedents. In telling the story of how the people took the Constitution back from the Lochner-era Supreme Court, the Issue Brief offers critical lessons for modern progressives fighting to reverse Citizens United.
On July 22, 2008, CAC submitted written testimony for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "Courting Big Business: The Supreme Court's Recent Decisions on Corporate Misconduct and Laws Regulating Corporations."
On June 28, 2011, CAC released an issue brief highlighting two themes that join together some of the Court’s most important and most sharply divided business cases of the October 2010 Term. The first theme concerns corporate accountability. The second theme involves corporate speech. The final section of this Issue Brief updates Constitutional Accountability Center’s empirical analysis of the trends in the success rate of the Chamber of Commerce before the Court over the past 30 years to include this Term’s decisions.
On March 10, 2010, CAC released the third narrative in its Text and History Narrative Series. Entitled A Capitalist Joker: The Strange Origins, Disturbing Past and Uncertain Future of Corporate Personhood in American Law, the narrative builds on the scholarly research discussed in CAC’s amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. The narrative examines a key issue that the Court addressed in the case: whether corporations have the same rights as individuals, particularly when it comes to influencing electoral politics.
On June 28, 2011, CAC submitted written testimony for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing "Barriers to Justice and Accountability: How the Supreme Court's Recent Rulings Will Affect Corporate Behavior."
In December 2010, CAC released an empirical study examining the success of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before the Supreme Court during the last 11 years of the tenure of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.