The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian, Here is a description:
Long before the US Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely "speak" with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), they elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This volume offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood.
The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning--on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms--still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments, modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, this volume analyzes legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.
And from the reviews:
"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons is that rare work that draws upon a genuine mastery of two distinct disciplines, and in so doing generates striking new insights in both. Moving adroitly between US jurisprudence and case history on the one hand and modernist literature on the other, it shows how the legal invention of corporate personhood reverberated well beyond the nation's courts and boardrooms. Indeed, this bold and often-dazzling study reveals the persistence and rigor with which the likes of Gertrude Stein, Muriel Rukeyser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Schuyler, and Ralph Ellison used the evolving doctrine of corporate personhood to think through issues as seemingly diverse as authorial intention and the nature of social and political collectives." -- Michael Szalay, author of New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State
"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons offers a compelling argument by opening up, far beyond traditional doctrinal concerns, novel vistas on corporate personhood that will greatly interest both those working in the field of Law and the Humanities and legal professionals. Crisply written, this is a thought-provoking monograph that forces us to reflect on acute philosophical and ethical questions about what it means to be "a person" in every sense of the word." -- Jeanne Gaakeer, author of Judging from Experience
