Dr. Carol Greenhouse

Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University, is the Arthur W. Marks professor and department Chair of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her main interests are in the cultural dimensions of law and politics in the United States - at the community level, as in her Praying for Justice and, more recently, as aspects of U.S. federal power (as in her edited volume, Ethnography and Democracy and her essays on the "war against terrorism"). She is also interested in how state legal and political institutions rework discourse and meaning from other domains as in A Moment't Notice and her co-edited volume, Ethnography in Unstable Places. Greenhouse is past president of the Law & Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, as well as a former editor of the American Enthologist.

This lecture offers a cultural analysis of the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United.  The legal controversies surrounding this case concerned the role of corporations in federal elections, and the Court’s ruling resulted in revisions to campaign finance law.  For the public, though, it is less the technicalities of election law that have drawn attention; rather, it is the Court’s formulation of corporations as persons. Corporate personhood is an old idea in the law, but Citizens shows the Court grappling afresh with some specific social qualities in its articulation of corporate personhood, and in relation to new communications technologies.  In this lecture, the focus is on the Court’s formulation of the social properties of corporate personhood, and by implication, its rendering of the corporate qualities of social groups.  In this sense, the Court dealt with fundamental social and cultural questions:  What is a group?  What is a corporation? What is the public interest in democracy? What is the meaning of money in politics? The lecture examines the ways in which the Court posed such questions, implicitly and explicitly, thereby carrying the significance of the case beyond electioneering to the role of law in everyday life.