An interview from NPR on how corporations came to be considered "persons" under the law.
A snippet - note that the idea comes from the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:
WITT: Well, the law has treated corporations as what some lawyers call metaphysical persons. That is, they're persons for some purposes and they're not persons for others.
BLOCK: What sorts of purposes then would apply here?
WITT: Well, for example, a corporation can be prosecuted for a crime, which is something that usually only persons can be prosecuted for. But on the other hand, corporations get rights. They get rights to contract. They can't marry or run for office or vote, but they can speak. Things like that.
BLOCK: The legal doctrine, as I understand, it goes back to a Supreme Court case. It's in the late 19th century, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. What was that case about essentially?
WITT: So, this is a case where the Occupy Wall Street protestors have distorted the details, but they really have it right in spirit. That was a case in which the Southern Pacific Railroad was protesting taxes that had been placed on it by California and by counties in California. And in that case, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Morrison Waite, stood up in January of 1886 and said what pretty much everybody in the courthouse thought, which was that corporations were persons for the purposes of the 14th Amendment.
BLOCK: The 14th Amendment dating from right after the Civil War, the Equal Protection Clause is what we're talking about.
WITT: Yeah, the Equal Protection Clause applies to all persons. It provides that all persons have a right to equal protection under the laws. And that question wasn't controversial at the time. What mattered, really, was what happened later.
- More about the case in question: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
- Corporate personhood.
