Law Commons^™

Citizens United And The Ineluctable Question Of Corporate Citizenship, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, corporations and individuals now enjoy the same rights to spend money on ads supporting or opposing candidates for office. Those concerned about the role of money in politics have much to decry about the decision. But the threat to democracy posed by allowing wealthy corporations to function as political speakers arises as well under a regime that allows wealthy individuals to do so. If we are not prepared to limit individuals’ expenditures on political speech, we will have to find a way to distinguish individuals’ and corporations’ free speech …

Citizen Responsibility And The Reactive Attitudes, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

This paper takes seriously the notion that individuals may bear responsibility for the transgressions of their group even where they do not bear the hallmarks of individual culpability. More specifically, I contend that citizenship itself can ground responsibility for the crimes of one’s nation-state, and I advance this contention in the context of a discussion about Americans’ responsibility for abuses committed in the course of the war in Iraq.

Moreover, the kind of responsibility I have in mind is not simply the forward-looking variety, which is what many forms of civil liability and reparations programs contemplate; nor is it simply …