Corporate Personhood: Possibilities for Progressive, Trans-Doctrinal Legal Reform

Abstract

Kent Greenfield’s Corporations Are People Too (And They Should Act Like It) reclaims the legal theory of corporate personhood from the conservative right and champions it for the progressive left. Greenfield argues that corporate personhood, properly construed, can further progressive goals by limiting certain corporate powers, increasing corporate accountability, and enabling corporate management to govern in the interests of all stakeholders. Greenfield advances a progressive account of corporate personhood and elaborates its implementation in constitutional law and in corporate law. This symposium response extends Greenfield’s conception of corporate person-hood to related questions in securities law and tort law. This is a first step in-tended to advance a legal reform project that further translates corporate personhood into a coherent doctrine that reaches across U.S. law.