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Full-Text Articles in Constitutional Law
The Derivative Nature Of Corporate Constitutional Rights, Margaret M. Blair, Elizabeth Pollman
The Derivative Nature Of Corporate Constitutional Rights, Margaret M. Blair, Elizabeth Pollman
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This Article engages the two hundred year history of corporate constitutional rights jurisprudence to show that the Supreme Court has long accorded rights to corporations based on the rationale that corporations represent associations of people from whom such rights are derived. The Article draws on the history of business corporations in America to argue that the Court’s characterization of corporations as associations made sense throughout most of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, when the Court was deciding several key cases involving corporate rights, this associational view was already becoming a poor fit for some corporations. The …
Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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A widely accepted model of American legal history is that "classical" legal thought, which dominated much of the nineteenth century, was displaced by "progressive" legal thought, which survived through the New Deal and in some form to this day. Within its domain, this was a revolution nearly on a par with Copernicus or Newton. This paradigm has been adopted by both progressive liberals who defend this revolution and by classical liberals who lament it.
Classical legal thought is generally identified with efforts to systematize legal rules along lines that had become familiar in the natural sciences. This methodology involved not …