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Greenfield Provokes with Declaration: ‘Corporations Are People Too’

New book says they should also behave like people.

       
April 5, 2016 -- BC Law School web redesign project. Photographed for Boston College by Caitlin Cunningham (www.caitlincunningham.com). 

Boston College Law School Professor Kent Greenfield’s new book, Corporations Are People Too (And They Should Act Like It), is five weeks from publication and already it’s at the top of Amazon’s “hot new releases” list.

Yale University Press, which releases the book October 23, described it this way: “Are corporations people? The US Supreme Court launched a heated debate when it ruled in Citizens United that corporations can claim the same free speech rights as humans. Should corporations be able to claim rights of free speech, religious conscience, and due process? Kent Greenfield provides an answer: Sometimes.”

Early reviews explain it further. Floyd Abrams, author of The Soul of the First Amendment, called Corporations Are People Too “a subtle, creative, and intellectually brave assessment of the nature of corporate personhood and the legal and policy results—constitutional and otherwise—that follow from that assessment.

“Greenfield offers thoughtful and often original views on topics ranging from the degree of First Amendment protection that corporations should receive to the nature of corporate behavior that shareholders and the broader public should come to expect,” he concluded.

Kent Greenfield is a former Supreme Court clerk and an expert in constitutional and corporate law. He is the author of the Myth of Choice (Yale, 2011) and numerous articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary, among others.

His articles are widely cited, and he has been called “the leading figure” and “the most creative thinker” in the progressive, stakeholder school of corporate law scholarship.

Greenfield is also frequently featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and on CNN.