You gotta give the boys in Bentonville their due: they try to figure out every way possible to wriggle off the hook. In the current issue of Business Week (requires subscription), senior writer and long-time labor reporter Aaron Bernstein describes how Wal-Mart lawyers are trying to completely eviscerate the framework of class action lawsuits for corporate wrong-doing. Remember, the Beast is a defendant in a huge discrimination case involving 1.5 million current and former women workers.

Instead of fighting the merits of the case (and there have been strong rumors that the company is trying to settle the case because the evidence is so strong against it), the Bentonville boys are arguing…are you sitting down?….that “its constitutional rights would be violated if the court allows” the suit to proceed, writes Bernstein. “Because such a case would deprive the company of its rights to defend itself against each woman’s claim, it argues, the courts should allow suits only on a store-by-store basis.”

Of course, the idea of trying to litigate each claim store by store for 1.5 million women would effectively kill the effort to hold Wal-Mart accountable and make a mess of the court system (I wonder if Karl Rove is helping behind the scenes? After all, clogging the courts is exactly what he would love to try to argue for more legislation to defang trial lawyers trying to hold corporations accountable).

Wal-Mart’s argument cites the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that “no person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Bernstein quotes Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a Wal-Mart lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, arguing that: “When you’re talking about taking money from one citizen and giving it to another, you can’t just rely on aggregate statistics, which don’t tell you who is actually discriminated against.”

But, Bernstein, then, points out correctly that:

The point of grouping many employees together into one lawsuit is to deal with complaints that they hold in common. In employment discrimination cases, the problems usually involve disparate policies or practices by the corporation. Indeed, the plaintiffs’ response is that broad workforce data are actually more reliable than individual hearings in such cases.

But, my question is: why doesn’t our side get smart, too? Corporations have been given broad rights—for example, that a corporation enjoys the same free speech rights as individuals–that have allowed them to run roughshod over the country. Why not be as smart as Wal-Mart and force a reexamination of corporate rights? If the world has changed, as we’re told almost daily, why not change the rules under which corporations operate for the benefit of most of us? Yeah, naive comment—but let’s give it a shot.