Adam Winkler: A Leading Voice in American Constitutional Law
Adam Winkler is a highly respected professor at UCLA School of Law, whose expertise spans American constitutional law, the Supreme Court, and gun policy. He has made significant contributions to legal scholarship, with his work frequently cited in landmark Supreme Court cases. He also serves as the school’s ACS faculty advisor and as a member of ACS’s Board of Academic Advisors.
Background and Education
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Adam Winkler is the son of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Irwin Winkler. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree. Later, he obtained a Master of Arts degree in political science from UCLA under Professor Karen Orren, specializing in American Political Development. Winkler received his J.D. from New York University School of Law, which honored him with the Legal Teaching Award for outstanding alumni in legal academia.
Early Career
After graduating from law school, Winkler clerked for David Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law at Katten Muchin in Los Angeles, where he was part of a litigation team that represented Michael Jackson in a highly publicized child-molestation case. This experience influenced his decision to return to academia. Prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 2002, Adam was the John M. Olin Fellow at the University of Southern California Law School’s Center in Law, Economics and Organization from 2001 to 2002.
Scholarly Contributions
Winkler has published extensively on American constitutional law and history. His scholarship has been cited in landmark Supreme Court cases, including opinions on the Second Amendment and on corporate free speech rights. He is one of the twenty most cited law professors in judicial opinions today.
"We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights"
Winkler is the author of “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights”. His book, “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Right,” highlights that corporations have had what you could call a civil rights history of their own, which has gone on in parallel to all other civil rights movements. The book describes the corporate rights movement: the two-hundred year effort by business corporations to achieve the same constitutional rights as ordinary people, culminating in the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, the California Book Award, and received the Scribes Award. The book uncovers the deep historical roots of Citizens United v. FEC.
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In his book, Winkler addresses the question of how this entire history could be so poorly understood, given the vast amount of publicly available knowledge in this field. Greg and Adam discuss this question among others, while also analyzing landmark cases in the flights of Corporations including Citizens United v. FEC, Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.
Winkler's book explores how corporations have achieved nearly all the same rights as individuals. He realized that this was a story that hadn't been well told, and as he dug into it, he found that it was a much more interesting, unexpected, surprising, and fascinating history than he could have ever imagined.
According to Winkler, the Supreme Court case that shaped our view on corporations is the Dartmouth College case. In the Dartmouth College case, the Supreme Court firmly sided with the idea that a corporation was more like a person, an individual than it was like the government. The court, in that case, could have allowed the state of New Hampshire to take over Dartmouth College and said that a corporation is really just another state agency in some form or some mild form of a state agency or government actor. But instead, the court said that the corporation was on the private side, more like the individual, and had rights against the government. And so that decision was really essential in sort of changing how we started to think about corporations and they became less and less about achieving public purposes and more and more about achieving private purposes. That is to say, making money for investors.
Winkler also points out that corporations have racial identities. We don't think of corporations necessarily as being black or white or whatnot, but the law treats them in such a way. We have laws that provide, for instance, various kinds of preferences, affirmative action, if you will, for minority business enterprises. Well, what is a minority business enterprise, other than a corporation that has been deemed to have a racial identity.
"Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America"
He is also the author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America”. While it won no awards, it was the subject of a question on the popular game show Jeopardy!.
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Other Publications
He was the co-editor of the “Encyclopedia of the American Constitution” (2d edition). Winkler's article has been cited over 300 times by works in numerous prestigious journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review to name a few.
Recognition and Awards
UCLA School of Law professor Adam Winkler has won the 2019 Scribes Book Award for his celebrated exploration of corporate personhood, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. Presented annually by the American Society of Legal Writers since 1961, the prestigious honor goes to “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.”
Winkler has won awards and honors for his work including the Scribes Book Award.
Media Appearances and Commentary
Winkler's popular writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Atlantic, Slate, Scotusblog, and Daily Beast. He is a frequent commentator about legal issues and has appeared on Face the Nation, CNN, NBC Nightly News, C-SPAN, Newshour, ABC News, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Marketplace.
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