Legal "personhood" has granted corporations increasing powers while citizens and national governments face diminishing powers in the expanding global economy. As a result, corporate decisions undermine and even nullify legal decisions made by democratically elected governments designed to protect citizens, both nationally and internationally. The growth of corporate power has kept pace with and even exceeded the rapid rise of globalization in the past two decades. With it has come the weakening of a nation’s ability to hold corporate power in check, and the increasing inability of states to protect the rights of individuals within their national boundaries as a result of the growing number of international legal instruments.

This work lays bare corporate actions both domestic and international, under the guise of legal "personhood," and shows how corporations flaunt laws and act as controlling powers beyond the constraints imposed on legal state citizens. Corporations are now “embedded” within domestic legal regimes and insinuate themselves to subvert the very systems designed to restrain corporate power and protect the public weal. Using international vehicles like the WTO and NAFTA, corporate collective power effectively supersedes the constitutional mandate of nation states.