Winter
2025
Volume 3.2
Summer
2024
The role of corporations in American life has become the focus of intense public and scholarly debate. How do corporations influence political outcomes? What norms or laws should structure corporate political participation? And who should decide what political interventions corporations make?
In the last few years, publicly held for-profit companies have been called upon to take public positions on myriad issues unconnected to core business concerns. Demands for public statements may arise from customers, employees, shareholders (large and small), the media, and others.
Corporations have always been involved in politics, but today is different. They are taking public positions, either directly or indirectly, on contested political and social issues unrelated to their businesses. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we argue that this practice, which we term “corporate political posturing,” is problematic.
Corporations are increasingly wading into social and political matters that are unrelated to their business operations. This Paper empirically investigates corporate participation in social debates through the corporate response to Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court invalidated the longstanding ban on the expenditure of corporate funds in federal election campaigns. In so doing, the Court dismissed outright an argument that had long been the foundation for the restriction of corporate money in election campaigns—that, due to the “substantial aggregations of wealth amassed by the special advantages which go with the corporate form[,]” corporate money poses a distinct threat to the integrity of democracy.
Uber has been described by its most extreme critics as “the root of all evil” for its lawbreaking business tactics, among other things, in pursuit of becoming “too big to ban.”
Federal tax law treats separate nonprofit corporations as distinct legal entities for almost all purposes, in common with most other areas of law. With respect to political activity, this means that one nonprofit corporation’s lobbying or election-related actions are generally not attributed to another nonprofit corporation.
In the spring of 2023, the FTC released a policy statement addressing biometric information and technologies using or purporting to use such information. The policy statement contains a remarkably broad definition of “biometric information” and describes a variety of business practices that could violate § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act by being either “deceptive” or “unfair.” In spite of the policy statement’s comprehensiveness, however, it has two substantial inadequacies.
The corporatization of health care in the United States has forced us to confront society’s moral expectations of the industry, which serves uniquely vulnerable consumers. Health care has become increasingly more lucrative, attracting private equity (“PE”) investment, specifically in private physicians’ practices.