The new, Corporate Person — In 1886, the Supreme Court, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, declared that the railroad corporation was a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, with rights to life, liberty, property, due process and equal protection. 1
The court curtly dispensed with ontological arguments that had been thrashed about in the lower courts. It instructed the clerk to tell the attorneys:
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 … corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
Legal philosophers erupted with questions about “real” and “artificial” persons. By mid-20th century, the jurisprudential trauma had been set aside under the press of increasing corporatization, resulting in a general agreement that it is not necessary to ask difficult questions about the “meaning” of “person”.
Stone echoes this earlier debate, saying:
The legal system does the best it can to maintain the illusion of the reality of the individual human being.
Stone says “corporate person” is not “mere legal fiction”; nor would “rights of Nature” be fiction.
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