14th amendment that would later serve as the first legal basis for corporate personhood in American law - by creating a new precedent for how the 14th amendment could be interpreted beyond civil rights. The 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company appealed to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. The Southern Pacific Railroad company had claimed that it should not have been the target of differential tax treatment in comparison to natural persons. What is both interesting and unusual about this case, is that the court never once officially acknowledged or attributed the defense’s argument appealing to the Equal Protection Clause as applying to corporations being a factor in its decision to favor the defense. However, it was a headnote added to the decision by a court reporter that would be the basis for subsequent decisions of applying the Equal Protection Clause to corporations. Within the headnote, Chief Justice Morrison Waite articulated:
The Court does not wish to hear an argument on the question of 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.2 The presumption made by Waite opened up the Equal Protection Clause as a medium for corporations to fight for the same rights enjoyed by natural citizens in the decades that followed. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, various state courts would pass general incorporation laws which would allow corporations to be created by any natural citizen without a need for a charter from the state legislature.3 The need for a government charter to create a corporation heavily tied corporations to state governments. In contrast, these statutes, predicated on the concept of corporate personhood set forth by the headnote of the Santa Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886) Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, The History of Corporate Personhood, Brennan Center for Justice (April 8, 2014), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/historycorporate-personhood 2 3
76
