Thom Hartmann has done research on that case ... seems the court never said corporations were persons with rights in that case ...
~snip~ (from little more than 1/2 way down the link's page)
So I went to Paul, the librarian, and said,
"This ruling you gave me doesn't say that corporations are persons." He answered, "That's interesting -
did you read the head note, the commentary on the case?" Then he showed me an introductory page of small boldface type, and the first sentence states,
"Corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment and therefore entitled to equal protection under the law." I said, "That's interesting - it's not in the decision. What is this?"
~snip~
Then I walked a few blocks to the office of an old friend of mine who is a lawyer in town, and laid the copies out on his desk. "I want to ask you about the 1886 Santa Clara County case," I told him, and he answered, "Oh, you mean the one where corporations become persons." Really, that is how lawyers inevitably respond. Then
I asked him to take a look at the last paragraph of the case. He read it, and said, "That's interesting." But when I had him read the first sentence of the head notes, his response was "Holy Cow!" or actually, something a little stronger. "Clearly," he said, "the head notes don't say what the ruling says." "Which means . . . ?" I asked. "Which means there is a mistake," he answered.
"A mistake?" I said.
"A hundred and twenty years of American law based on a mistake? The World Trade Organization is based on a mistake?" And he said, "Calm down, I'm not an expert on constitutional law. Why don't you call somebody who knows this stuff?" So I went home and called Deb Markowitz, who is the Secretary of State for Vermont - "Hello, I'd like to speak to Deb Markowitz." The answer was, "this is Deb." That is one of the advantages of living in a small state! I told her that I had a question about the 1886 Santa Clara County Case, and she replied, "Oh, the one where corporations became persons." I said, "Yes, that one," and asked her if she had read it. She said she hadn't, although she had studied the case in law school. So I read to her from the end of the case, where the court declines to rule on the constitutional issues, and her response was about the same as my friend's - she was shocked.
And when I asked what it meant, she said it showed that the Court never said that corporations are persons, and never granted them constitutional rights.I thought this was great: All we would have to do would be to clarify this one ruling. But she told me the issue was much more complicated, since the Court had made other decisions based on the (erroneous) information in the head notes. (Since then, I have found 36 such cases.) She then told me, "It doesn't matter who the court cites as precedent, even it it's Donald Duck; once they make a ruling, it is the law."
So, the 1886 Santa Clara County case wasn't the actual precedent that established corporate personhood, but once the court quoted the clerk's head notes, the precedent was established.By the way, it turns out that
the clerk who wrote the head notes, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, had been the Assistant Secretary of State in the Ulysses S. Grant administration. The Grant administration was arguably the most corrupt in American history, and they were especially known for being in bed with the railroads; many people in that administration had to resign because of bribery scandals. Further, Davis had served on the board of a major railroad himself. I found a letter in the National Archives in which Davis asks the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite if the Court had ruled that corporations are persons, along with this response from Waite: "I leave it to you whether to discuss that in the commentary in as much as we avoided meeting the constitutional issue in our decision." In other words, using the passive voice employed by 19th century lawyers, he says, "We didn't rule that." (You can see these documents on my web sites, unequalprotection.com or thomhartmann.com.)
This is why the title of my book refers to "the rise of corporate dominance and the theft of human rights." Make no mistake:
This was a theft, since the Supreme Court never actually ruled that corporations have the same rights as persons.{/b]
~snip~
http://www.bodhitree.com/lectures/hartmann2.html
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