For reasons that were never recorded, moments before the Supreme Court was to render its decision in the now infamous Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case, Chief Justice Waite turned his attention to Delmas and the other attorneys present.
As railroad attorney Sanderson and his two colleagues watched, Waite told Delmas and his two colleagues that: "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 of the opinion that it does."
He then turned to Justice Harlan who delivered the court's opinion in the case.
In the written record of the case, the court recorder noted: "The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This written statement, that corporations were "persons" rather than "artificial persons," with an equal footing under the Bill of Rights as humans, was not a formal ruling of the court, but was reportedly a simple statement by its Chief Justice, recorded by the court recorder.
There was no Supreme Court decision to the effect that corporations are equal to natural persons and not artificial persons.
There were no opinions issued to that effect, and therefore no dissenting opinions on this immensely important constitutional issue.
There was no public debate of the issue among the justices, and no discussion in open court.
The written record, as excerpted above, simply assumed corporate personhood without any explanation why. The only explanation provided was the court recorder's reference to something he says Waite said, which essentially says, "that's just our opinion" without providing legal argument.
In these two sentences (according to the conventional wisdom), Waite weakened the kind of democratic republic the original authors of the Constitution had envisioned, and set the stage for the future worldwide damage of our environmental, governmental, and cultural commons. The plutocracy that had arisen with the East India Company in 1600, and been fought back by America's Founders, had gained a tool that was to allow them, in the coming decades, to once again gain control of most of North America, and then the world. Ironically, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the years between his proclamation and 1910, only 19 dealt with African Americans: 288 were suits brought by corporations seeking the rights of natural persons.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out, fifty years later, "I do not believe the word "person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations. "- Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection."
Sixty years later, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas made the same point, writing that, "There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view [that corporations are legally "persons']."
There was no change in legislation, and President Grover Cleveland had not issued a proclamation that corporations should be considered the same as natural persons. The U.S. Constitution does not even contain the word "corporation," and has never been amended to contain it, because the Founders wanted corporations to be regulated as close to home as possible, by the states, so they could be kept on a short leash - presumably so nothing like the East India Company would ever again arise to threaten the entrepreneurs of America.
But as a result of this case, for the past hundred-plus years corporate lawyers and politicians have claimed that Chief Justice Waite turned the law on its side and reinvented America's social hierarchy.
"But wait a minute," many legal scholars have said over the years. Why would Waite say, before arguments about corporations being persons, that the court had already decided the issue - and then allow Delmas and Sanderson to argue the point anyway?
Or, alternately, why would he say such a thing after arguments were already made? By all accounts he was rational and a capable Justice, so it wouldn't make sense that he'd do that.
