The Myth of Corporate Personhood
Myth has it that, in the 1886 Supreme Court Case of Santa Clara County v The Southern Pacific Railroad, corporations were granted the same protections based upon The Bill of Rights that natural human beings possess. Subsequent court cases have based decisions favorable to corporations upon this myth.
The truth is that the clerk of the court, J. C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad board president, wrote "Corporations are persons" in the headnotes of the case.
Ironically, the case had nothing at all to do with whether or not corporations were persons. Furthermore, headnotes do not carry the weight of the law and are not part of the decision.
Yet, as mentioned, court cases that followed Santa Clara County v. The Southern Pacific Railroad have been decided upon as if the 1886 case legally gave personhood to corporations.
There are many court cases which have protected corporations as though they were natural human beings. The following are three examples.
The first example is First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti, 1978. In this case, the court found that political donations by corporations are protected by the first amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees "people" free speech. It claimed, in essence, that money is speech. Obviously, some "people" are able to speak louder than others.
Two court cases protected corporations based upon their "rights" as stated in the fourth amendment to the Constitution.
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