Talk:Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
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Contents |
[edit] Bogosity meter tripped
The story in this section sounds suspicious.Even it this *weren't* an accurate precedent surely there would be other supreme court cases on the topic.Roadrunner 22:33, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
- Roadrunner, your "Bogosity meter" was accurate. The article was almost completely false. The case did NOT create the doctrine of corporate personhood, nor has any court misunderstood it to mean that. The case DID apply the Fourteenth Amendment to "juristic persons." This is NOT a mistaken reading, that's what the case did. I don't know where the original writer got information on the private discussion between Supreme Court justices and their clerks. I've tried to clean it up some--Bibliophylax 23:35, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "Bogosity meter" failed; zero "bogosity" found
FYI, (1) Chief Justice Waite himself explicitly stated in his (recently discovered) letter of 31, May 1886 that the case DID NOT apply the Fourteenth Amendment to "juristic persons". link to Waite Correspondence to Court Reporter J.C Bancroft Davis. A reading of case itself (instead of the headnotes of the case) will quickly confirm this. (2) The case HAS been widely and frequently (and mistakenly) cited by USSC for over 100 years as being the Court's first declaration that corporations are "persons" for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In fact this case HAS been misunderstood in exactly the manner described.
It's now a matter of history.
The decision did not rule that corporations are persons: Davis added it in the headnotes (commentary) on his own, and subsequent courts have incorrectly based decisions since 1886 on the headnotes and not the case. (Thanks to Michael Kinder, who found this in the J.C. Bancroft Davis collection of personal papers in the National Archives in Washington, DC, where they had been sitting, unnoticed, for over a century.), The letter from Davis to Waite asking if he got the comments right precedes Waite's response. Davis writes, after quoting language stating that corporations are persons, "please let me know whether I correctly caught your comments and oblige [reply]." In his reply to Davis, Waite writes: "I think your mem(ory) in the California Rail Road tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the arguments began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision."
Waite-Davis letters from the National Archives
riverguy42 21:16, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Revert
Can someone revert this to the last version by User:Bibliophylax? I'm not very good at this. >.> --AgentCDE 04:22, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Disputed?
The content of this article is, by most peoples' accounts, disputed. See Corporate personhood debate. Could someone mark it as such? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Terrio (talk • contribs) 01:42, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
- Worse than disputed, I would say. Most of the article seems to have been taken verbatim from this article in a publication called "The People's Voice". A footnote was added but this kind of content copying is not appropriate and The People's Voice is hardly a reliable source. Note also that content was added by an anonymous user in the revision of 14 February. Accordingly, I am deleting the added content. Elliotreed (talk) 13:50, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
