These are my people. Many of the leaders of this movement are friends and respected colleagues. I contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s senatorial campaign and voted for Reich when he ran for governor of Massachusetts. Forty years ago, my coal miner grandfather sat me down and told me how a union had saved his life. As a law professor, I have spent my career as an oddity—a progressive who teaches corporate law, almost always the most liberal person in any room of business law academics. A decade ago, I came up with a novel legal theory that shareholder activists recently put to good use suing the Hershey Company over the use of child labor in West African chocolate cultivation.

A corporate lickspittle I’m not.

But the attack on corporate personhood is a mistake. And it may, ironically, be playing into the hands of the financial and managerial elite.

What’s the best way to control corporate power? More corporate personhood, not less.

If you’re shopping for glue sticks or glitter and hearing Christian music over a loudspeaker, you’re probably in a Hobby Lobby store. An arts-and-crafts retailer, Hobby Lobby is a big company, with upwards of 20,000 employees and more than 600 stores. But it’s a “closely held” corporation—meaning its stock is not publicly traded. The stock is owned by members of one family, the Greens of Oklahoma City, who are devout Christians. As enacted, the Affordable Care Act contained a provision requiring the company to provide its employees with health insurance that includes all medically approved forms of contraceptive care. The Greens objected. They believe that four of those methods are “abortifacients,” and claimed that the coverage mandate violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

When their suit made it to the Supreme Court in early 2014, a group of corporate law professors (of which I was one) filed a “friend of the court” brief arguing against the corporation.

The brief’s main argument? Corporate personhood.

Understand that “corporate personhood” simply expresses the idea that the corporation has a legal identity separate from its shareholders. That separateness, the brief pointed out, is inherent in what it means to be a corporation. A “first principle” of corporate law (as we explained) is that “for-profit corporations are entities that possess legal interests and a legal identity of their own—one separate and distinct from their shareholders.” The very purpose of the corporation as a legal form is to create an entity “distinct in its legal interests and existence from those who contribute capital to it.” This separateness means that shareholders are not held liable for the debts of the corporation. That makes it possible for people who do not wish to oversee the day-to-day activities of companies in which they invest—and do not wish to risk every penny they own if the corporation goes bankrupt—to invest in corporate stock. In other words, this separateness is what makes capital markets possible. And capital markets are essential for the development of a vibrant national economy. Beyond that, corporations can exist long after the life of any individual that invests in, or works for, them. This means, as the legal scholar Lynn Stout has pointed out, that corporations provide a mechanism for society to make long-term, intergenerational investments that are not linked to government or a specific family.