Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with corporate entities and equal protection.

The decision concerned three separate cases:

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company
California v. Central Pacific Railroad Company
California v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company

At the lower court levels the question of whether corporations were persons had been argued, and these arguments were submitted in writing to the Court. However, before oral argument took place, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite announced: "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," (the equal protection clause).

The court decision, written by Justice Harlan in favor of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, consists of a lengthy discussion of various technical factors and does not rely upon or include the determination that corporations can be classified as "persons" according to the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. However, the court reporter, J. C. Bancroft Davis, inserted Chief Justice Waite's comments as "Statement of Facts", even though Chief Justice Waite stressed to Davis that the court did not rely on this information to reach its decision.

Many cases since have referred to this decision as setting a legal precedent for recognition of corporate personhood, even though the Supreme Court decided in the 1905 case of United States v. Detroit Lumber that headnotes and statement of fact can not be construed as being part of official court decisions.

Some historians have speculated that the reason Chief Justice Waite may have declined to hear arguments regarding the personhood status of corporations is because he may have been convinced that this was the original intent of Congress when drafting the amendment through testimony by Roscoe Conkling during the San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case of 1882. Roscoe Conkling was one of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment and he claimed that members of congress were careful to use the word "person" rather than "citizen" when writing the Fourteenth Amendment so that corporations could be included in the definition. As evidence, he read from a secret journal that was written during the drafting process. However, in 1932, a Stanford law librarian, Howard Graham discovered that the entries read during Conkling's testimony differed from the entries in the secret journal. He concluded that Roscoe Conkling, who was working for the railroad industry at the time of his testimony before the Supreme Court, purposely misled the court with his testimony in order to grant corporations the same constitutional rights as natural persons. Eight detailed publications by Graham about the topic were compiled and republished as Everyman's Constitution in 1968.

References

Graham, Howard Jay, "Everyman's Constitution", State Historical Society of Wisconsin (1968)
Graham, Howard Jay, "The Conspiracy Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment", The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 47: 341 (1938)
Hartmann, Thom, "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights", Rondale Books (April 24, 2004) ISBN 1-57954-955-1
Nace, Ted, "Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy", Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco (2003) ISBN 1-57675-260-7

External links

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See also

References

External links