A Quick Class on Corporate Personhood...
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Let's start with my thesis: Corporate Personhood has NEVER been legally proven in court.
Now here's my evidence:
The original court case, San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road in 1886, was the first to declare that corporations were people.
The problem is that it was never part of the original decision. It was just a headnote added by a court clerk.
Nonetheless, the case is used as a precedent in almost every case challenging corporate personhood.
FROM: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-corporate-personhood
The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War in 1868 to grant emancipated slaves full citizenship, states, “No state shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws.”
We have the likes of former U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling to thank for the extension of Equal Protection to corporations. Conkling helped draft the 14th Amendment. He then left the Senate to become a lawyer. His Gilded Age law practice was going so swimmingly that Conkling turned down a seat on the Supreme Court not once, but twice.
Conkling argued to the Supreme Court in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road that the 14th Amendment is not limited to natural persons. In 1882, he produced a journal that seemed to show that the Joint Congressional Committee that drafted the amendment vacillated between using “citizen” and “person” and the drafters chose person specifically to cover corporations. According to historian Howard Jay Graham, “[t]his part of Conkling’s argument was a deliberate, brazen forgery.”
As Thom Hartmann notes the Supreme Court embraced Conkling’s reading of the 14th Amendment in a headnote in 1886 in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road: “Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: ‘The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.’” This was not part of the formal opinion. But the damage was done. Later cases uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.
Are corporations people?
I don't think they are because they can't vote in elections, but other folks here have added that they also can't be arrested or executed in either the state of Texas or Florida.
I'd like to see that last one, but what do you think?
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