National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year A
Washington Post
Notable Book of the Year A PBS “Now Read This” Book Club Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the
Economist
and the
Boston Globe
A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (
).
In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (
New York Times Book Review
, front page), Adam Winkler, author of
Gunfight
, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business.
Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (
), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (
Wall Street Journal
We the Corporations
is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.