Leo E. Strine, Jr. is Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, the Austin Wakeman Scott Lecturer on Law and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. This post is based on Chief Justice Strine’s recent essay, Corporate Power Ratchet: The Courts’ Role in Eroding “We the People’s” Ability to Constrain Our Corporate Creations forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and issued earlier as a working paper of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. Related research on corporate political spending from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Originalist or Original: The Difficulties of Reconciling Citizens United with Corporate Law History, and Conservative Collision Course?: The Tension between Conservative Corporate Law Theory and Citizens United, both by Leo Strine and Nicholas Walter (discussed on the Forum here and here), and Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending and Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides?, both by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson (discussed on the Forum here and here).
Leo Strine, Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, the Austin Wakeman Scott Lecturer on Law and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, recently issued an essay that is forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. The essay, titled Corporate Power Ratchet: The Courts’ Role in Eroding “We the People’s” Ability to Constrain Our Corporate Creations, is available here. The abstract of Chief Justice Strine’s essay summarizes it as follows:
At the beginning of our nation and throughout much of our history, corporations, as the creation of society, were seen as distinctive from human citizens. Human beings were born with certain inalienable rights that government could not take away. By contrast, corporations were the opposite of Lockean-Jeffersonian citizens, in the sense that they had only such rights as society gave them. Under this understanding, society could charter corporations and benefit from their wealth-creating potential while reserving for itself the right to limit corporate activities through externality-reducing legislation and other means so as to protect the public interest.