Adam Winkler

Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (2018) and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011).

From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with NPR's Dave Davies:

DAVE DAVIES: Adam Winkler, welcome to FRESH AIR. You tell many, many cases of corporations going before the courts and saying, if we were a person, we would have this right - the right to sue here, the right to freedom of speech, you know, the right to exemption from unreasonable searches and seizures. And they would argue that those rights ought to be afforded to corporations and businesses as well as people.

Is there ever any evidence that when the Constitution was drafted and the Bill of Rights, the founders thought of these rights as going to businesses as corporations as well as people?

ADAM WINKLER: There's no evidence that the framers ever intended the Constitution to protect business corporations, too. You can go through all of the ratifying conventions. The issue is just never raised. And in fact, the founding generation harbored a certain hostility towards corporations with Jefferson condemning what he called the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations.

And indeed, if we think about some of the key incidents in the revolutionary era, the Revolution was in part a revolt against a powerful corporation, too. We think of...[read on]

Learn more about We the Corporations at the publisher's website.

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been featured on CNN and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.

The Page 99 Test: Gunfight.

The Page 99 Test: We the Corporations.

--Marshal Zeringue