Citizens United v. FEC (2008) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) were important Supreme Court cases in establishing corporate rights of free speech and religious freedom (the former constitutionally, the latter statutorily). They were and are also loudly criticized for extending these rights of “personhood” to the artificial person of the corporation. Certainly in the religious freedom context, but also in the speech context, the disagreement over corporate rights tracks a more fundamental difference with respect to the fundamental location of the right of religious liberty: the “church” or the individual.

Here is a new book that argues that corporations do have rights under certain circumstances, but that this imposes on them certain responsibilities–responsibilities which, the author claims, are imposed on individuals as rights-bearers. I’m curious to see just which responsibilities he has in mind. The book is Corporations Are People Too (And They Should Act Like It) (Yale UP) by Kent Greenfield (image only available in the Yale catalogue at present).

Are corporations people? The U.S. 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. With an analysis sure to challenge the assumptions of both progressives and conservatives, Greenfield explores corporations’ claims to constitutional rights and the foundational conflicts about their obligations in society. He argues that a blanket opposition to corporate personhood is misguided, since it is consistent with both the purpose of corporations and the Constitution itself that corporations can claim rights at least some of the time. The problem with Citizens United is not that corporations have a right to speak, but for whom they speak. The solution is not to end corporate personhood but to require corporations to act more like citizens.

It’s democratic soteriology week here at the Forum. Frankly, it’s astonishing just how many books are being published by academics–legal and otherwise–on the subject of saving democracy. But it seems most of them have in mind the saving of particular kinds and forms of democracy, rather than democracy itself, since the threats most of them warn against and advise about are not principally those of democracy but of other perceived evils. That seems to be the case with this new book as well, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (Chicago UP) by University of Chicago Law School professors Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq. The “rigidity” of the Constitution, and its consequent empowerment of the Supreme Court to “infringe” people’s rights, are blamed.

Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self rule. In the United States, the election of Donald Trump marked a decisive turning point for many. What kind of president calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” or sees a moral equivalence between violent neo-Nazi protesters in paramilitary formation and residents of a college town defending the racial and ethnic diversity of their homes? Yet we can be assured that the Constitution offers safeguards to protect against lasting damage— or can we? How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq show how constitutional rules can either hinder or hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—do not necessarily succeed as bulwarks against democratic decline. Rather, Ginsburg and Huq contend, the sobering reality for the United States is that, to a much greater extent than is commonly realized, the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. Its structural rigidity has had the unforeseen consequence of empowering the Supreme Court to fill in some details—often with doctrines that ultimately facilitate rather than inhibit the infringement of rights. Even the bright spots in the Constitution—the First Amendment, for example—may have perverse consequences in the hands of a deft communicator, who can degrade the public sphere by wielding hateful language that would be banned in many other democracies. But we—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.

Here is another in the burgeoning “What’s Wrong With Democracy?” canon, co-authored by the distinguished political scientists Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro: Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself (Yale UP). Interestingly, in an age of renewed calls for federalism, decentralization, and local political decisionmaking ostensibly to resist the populist and nationalist tides, the authors argue for precisely the opposite: centralization of political power in major political parties and decreased popular control.

In recent decades, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones. Yet voters keep getting angrier. There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents’ long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.

It was only last week that Mark noted University of Edinburgh historian Brian Stanley’s book on Evangelicalism. Well, Professor Stanley has been busy, because he also has a second new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton UP). In American law, the twentieth century saw major changes as respects Christianity. Christianity is far and away the predominant religion in the United States as a historical matter, and nearly all of the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause firepower was directed at it in the twentieth century (as I discuss in this paper). It would be interesting to see what Professor Stanley has to say about the American situation in this new book.

Christianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world’s great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. Written by a leading scholar of world Christianity, the book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today–one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia.

Brian Stanley sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. Rather, Stanley provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom’s fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe.

Transnational in scope and drawing on the latest scholarship, Christianity in the Twentieth Century demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.

Here’s an interesting new volume that seems to want very much to reflect an anti-originalist view of the meaning of constitutional text (and that aspires to “explosive” implications for originalism), and yet might be thought, at least from the description, to be consistent with certain theories of “liquidation” of constitutional meaning that have been employed to supplement originalism. Incidentally, the original meaning of the religion clauses, as Donald Drakeman and others have shown, is notoriously opaque. Perhaps it might benefit from the sorts of methods employed by the author in this work. The book is The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard UP), by the historian Jonathan Gienapp.

Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

Here is what looks like a rich and very useful intellectual history of liberalism that disagrees with, or at least greatly qualifies, certain contemporary views about the nature of the dominant political philosophy of the last 500 years. Of particular interest is the authors claim that many “liberals” were originally deeply religious thinkers and invested in the comprehensive (to use a modern term) morality of liberalism. The book is The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP) by historian Helena Rosenblatt.

The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry—and a term of derision—in today’s increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words “liberal” and “liberalism,” revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning.

In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. She shows that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and Germans who transformed it. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the concept become widely known in the United States—and then, as now, its meaning was hotly debated. Liberals were originally moralists at heart. They believed in the power of religion to reform society, emphasized the sanctity of the family, and never spoke of rights without speaking of duties. It was only during the Cold War and America’s growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms.

Today, we still can’t seem to agree on liberalism’s meaning. In the United States, a “liberal” is someone who advocates big government, while in France, big government is contrary to “liberalism.” Political debates founder because of semantic and conceptual confusion. The Lost History of Liberalism sets the record straight on a core tenet of today’s political conversation and lays the foundations for a more constructive discussion about the future of liberal democracy.