The Straight Dope: How can a corporation be legally considered a person? ~ NanoThoughts 1.0

Friday, April 01, 2005

The Straight Dope: How can a corporation be legally considered a person?

When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite supposedly prefaced the proceedings by saying, "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 the opinion that it does." In its published opinion, however, the court ducked the personhood issue, deciding the case on other grounds.

Then the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, stepped in. Although the title makes him sound like a mere clerk, the court reporter is an important official who digests dense rulings and summarizes key findings in published "headnotes." (Davis had already had a long career in public service, and at one point was president of the board of directors for the Newburgh & New York Railroad Company.) In a letter, Davis asked Waite whether he could include the latter's courtroom comment--which would ordinarily never see print--in the headnotes. Waite gave an ambivalent response that Davis took as a yes. Eureka, instant landmark ruling.

The Straight Dope: How can a corporation be legally considered a person?

And, uh, as much as I wish it was, this isn't an April Fool's joke.

1 comment:

heatkernel said...

wow crazy story. I wonder who is the court reporter now and if he still has that much power. I think though that if the Supreme Court justices had really objected to the title that the reporter wrote, they would have corrected it or issued a retraction. So, for practical purposes, one can still say that the justices decided a corporation was a person. I have also been told that many other subsequent SC decisions affirmed that a corporation had 14th Amendment rights to "equal protection under the law", though I couldn't name them.