Corporate Qualities in Law and Society: A Case from the United States

Abstract

Neoliberalism compresses state and non-state powers together in ways that pose fresh interpretive challenges for anthropologists and sociolegal scholars interested in the social and cultural significance of law. In this article, I develop a “case study” around a recent opinion of the United States Supreme Court in which these are among the issues. I examine Federal Elections Commission versus Citizens United —a case that involved the rights of corporations to spend money on federal electoral campaigns. The outcome was highly controversial in the United States, since it removed longstanding restrictions on corporate spending in the political sphere. From an ethnographic standpoint, though, the significance of the case may be less in what it allows corporations to say and do in the electoral context, than in the ways particular qualities of sociality claimed (by the Court) to be inherent in corporations are valorized and prioritized. I suggest that the protean nature of corporate qualities as defined by the Court points to a potential significance of the case to everyday life that extends to the meaning of the very distinction between law and society