The Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy
(POCLAD) posted a “Model Legal Brief to Eliminate
Corporate Rights” to its website on October 10, making it available to help citizen groups create winning organizing strategies by stripping constitutional protections from corporations and preventing them from governing their communities.
Richard Grossman, co-founder of POCLAD, authored the brief with Thomas Linzey, Esq., director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, (CELDF) a public interest law firm in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Dan Brannen, a Santa Fe attorney.
The Brief was created to support community leaders and citizens across the United States who are confronting the array of judicially bestowed constitutional rights wielded by corporations. The Brief not only challenges “corporate personhood” – the theory that corporations possess the constitutional rights of people and therefore may use the Bill of Rights to get courts and police to deny people’s fundamental rights, but also confronts the powers corporations
wield under the Commerce and Contracts Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.