The recent financial crisis has brought new attention to the politics of economic behaviour in the United States. This article uses a critical legal geographical examination of corporate regulation in the US to guide emerging interest past the narrow focus on the past 10 years to a more substantive engagement with US corporate regulatory history. The argument advanced is that the open, critical and creative public discussion needed to define and enforce the desired role for corporations in contemporary society requires that critical attention be paid to conceptions of the corporation and of corporate rights and the political geography of corporate regulation that have generally gone unexamined.