Comments on working around the "spirit of the law"

Of the many points discussed in this class, the ones that get to me the most are those involving corporations going around “the spirit of the law”. In Silver’s Chapter 4, entitled Violating the Spirit of the Law, he provided many cases including ones we’d talked about in class several weeks ago (i.e. United Airlines pension default, the Sinclair Broadcast Group issue, tax shifting). Although we had talked about these before, I read them again this weekend and recalled just how frustrated I was to hear about these originally.

It is upsetting that corporations can take part in large-scale activities to act in their own interests and neglect other parties (employees, shareholders, etc.), usually in the name of profits. I am not sure when or how these activities will ever stop. I do agree that companies should really use the U.S. legal system to push through changes that (they believe) need to be made, as the system intended, but I just have a hard time seeing how that will happen anytime soon, when the government itself is so intertwined with those very companies.

I know that voting is a mechanism that the American public has to elect officials that they believe will make the right choices for the good of the public, as in handling corporate activities, but I feel like even if citizens vote for the “right” people for office, it won’t make a difference in the end; it seems that the lobbyists and other pressures internal to the government will end up swinging regulations in favor of corporations anyway.