News Release

Author, filmmaker of 'The Corporation'
to speak after free documentary screening

CHAPEL HILL - Canadian law professor Joel Bakan will discuss his award-winning book and documentary film, "The Corporation," at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 25.

Bakan's free public talk will be at 7 p.m. in the Frank Porter Graham Student Union auditorium. A free screening of the film will be held the day before (April 24) at 7 p.m. in the auditorium.

Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, says the modern business corporation functions like an individual with a psychopathic personality. His 2003 film explores the nature of the corporation and its rise. It features footage from pop culture, advertising, television news and corporate propaganda. Taking the corporation's legal status as a "person" to its logical conclusion, the film asks, "What kind of person is it?"

"The Corporation" includes 40 interviews with corporate insiders and critics - including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Michael Moore - in addition to true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

Bakan's main interest as a legal scholar is how the law shapes and is shaped by social and economic forces. His book and film came out of that interest. Bakan wrote "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" during the making of the film, for which he was a writer, co-creator and associate producer.

In 1997, he published, "Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs," in which he argued that constitutional rights were becoming increasingly ineffective in protecting the ideals they embodied, such as freedom, equality and justice. Bakan is a former Rhodes Scholar and former law clerk to the late Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The event is sponsored by the Parr Center for Ethics, in the philosophy department, and the sociology and philosophy departments, all part of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences; the student Economics Club; the schools of Law and of Journalism and Mass Communication; Investors Title Insurance Company and NC Hillel's Perlmutter Ethics Program.

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Parr Center contacts: Dr. Jan Boxill, associate chairwoman and senior lecturer in the philosophy department, (919) 962-3317; Carlo Robustelli, assistant to the director of the Parr Center for Ethics, (919) 843-5640
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu
News Services contacts: Print, L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589; broadcast, Karen Moon, (919) 962-9585