It was late at night and I wrote "citizenship" where I should have written "personhood". You are right, Zig - my apologizes.
I appreciate the acknowledgement of the error, but you don't need to apologize, it was an error, not an offense.
I would like you to show some evidence that corporate personhood was "well established" in the late 1800s.
First, a note about what corporate personhood means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
"Corporate personhood is an American legal concept that a corporation may be recognized as an individual in the eyes of the law. This doctrine forms the basis for legal recognition that corporations, as groups of people, may hold and exercise certain rights under the common law and the U.S. Constitution. For example,
corporations may contract with other parties
and sue or be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons. The doctrine does not hold that corporations are flesh and blood "people" apart from their shareholders, executives, and managers, nor does it grant to corporations all of the rights of citizens."
The issue of the right of corporations to form contracts is not a trivial one, and in fact it was a central issue in
Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a case the Supreme Court decided in 1819, well before your
Santa Clara case. And as I alluded to before, the very fact that the railroad was being sued in the
Santa Clara case itself rests upon the concept of corporate personhood: the corporation must be a legal person in order to be sued. You can't sue a donkey or a rock in court. And nobody contested the ability of anyone to sue
Southern Pacific, nor were they the first corporation to be sued or to sue.
Now, I do not know if the
term "corporate personhood" was used in any of these earlier court cases. But that's not the claim I wish to defend: the concept was there, and well established. Evolutions in terminology can be important, and I make no claims to when that happened (I really don't know), only that the actual principle predates
Santa Clara v Southern Pacific. That case has become significant in terms of the rights of corporations, but it extended those rights
past mere corporate personhood.
