Adam Winkler to Deliver Annual Hendricks Law and History Lecture On Friday, April 9, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler will deliver the annual Hendricks Lecture in Law and History. The title of Winkler’s talk is “How Corporations Became People.”

By Peter Jetton
March 22, 2021

On Friday, April 9, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler will deliver the annual Hendricks Lecture in Law and History. The title of Winkler’s talk is “How Corporations Became People.”

The lecture will begin at 4:00 p.m. in a virtual format. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Winkler is a specialist in American constitutional law, the Supreme Court, and gun policy. His talk is based on his book “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Bar Association’s Legal Gavel Award, the California Book Award, and received the Scribes Award. In the book, Winkler examines the historical origins of the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby cases and explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business.

Winkler is also the author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011). His scholarship has been cited in landmark Supreme Court cases on the First and Second Amendments, and he is one of the twenty most cited law professors in judicial opinions today.

Winkler is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and New York University School of Law, which honored him with the Legal Teaching Award for outstanding alumni in legal academia. He also earned a master’s degree in political science from UCLA. He clerked for David Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced law at Katten Muchin in Los Angeles. Prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 2002, Winkler was the John M. Olin Fellow at the University of Southern California Law School’s Center in Law, Economics and Organization. He serves on the board of directors of the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Constitution Society.

The Law and History lecture series at W&L was endowed by alumnus Pete Hendricks (’66A, ’69L), who has a private practice in Atlanta specializing in land use zoning and government permitting. A history major himself, Hendricks also endowed the Hendricks History Major Stipend Fund and the Ollinger Crenshaw Prize in History at the University in honor of his favorite professor.