Just as the Paris Commune had radicalised Justice Stephen Field u00 years earlier, the social movements in the U.S during the 1960s also awakened a fear of disorder, radicalized a generation of right-wing market fundamentalists, and instilled sense of mission in soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Powell Richmond lawyer then best known for representing the tobacco industry after the surgeon general's 1964 linkage of cigarettes to lung cancer, wrote a lengthy and historic 1971 memorandum for the us. Chamber of Commerce in which he presented a comprehensive plan for a sustained and massively funded long-term effort to change the nature of the US, Congress, state legislatures, and the judiciary in order to tilt the balance in favor of corporate interests. Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon two months later-though his plan for the Chamber of Commerce was not disclosed publicly until long after his confirmation hearings. A former president of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Powell was widely respected, even by his ideological opponents. But his aggressive expansion of corporate rights was the most consequential development during his tenure on the court
Justice Powell wrote decisions creating the novel concept of “corporate speech," which he found to be protected by the First Amendment. This doctrine was then used by the court to invalidate numerous laws that were intended to restrain corporate power when it interfered with the public interest. In 1978, for example, Powell wrote the opinion in a 5-4 decision that for the first time struck down state laws prohibiting corporate money in an election (a citizens referendum in Massachusetts) on the grounds that the law violated the free speech of "corporate persons. Thirty-two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court relied on Powell's opinion to allow wealthy individual donors to contribute unlimited amounts to campaigns secretly, and further expanded the 1886 Southern Pacific precedent declaring corporations to be persons