This article by Jane Anne Morris was published on her website, DemocracyThemePark.org on April 5, 2015. It contains the entire 1995 booklet she wrote, titled, “How to Research the Legal History of Corporations in Your State”.
The piece below, once available as a pamphlet, was written in 1998 to try to induce “activists” to pierce the invisible force field that seems to keep them from reading the history of corporate law. Whether or not it succeeds in that sense, it offers a perspective on current democratic efforts that I thought then and still think is essential before any real progress will be made in turning around national and world trends.
This pamphlet is an effort to help people do their own research on the history of corporate law in their own states. (And this is not the same thing as the history of corporations, the history of labor uprisings, or the history of ecological depredations.)
It sounds intimidating, but in fact it is liberating, because you realize how self-censoring and limited most “activism” is today. This was written while I was working with a group called POCLAD (my time there was 1995-2005), and I have retained references to that group and its work at the time. …
To read the entire article, click HERE.