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Show 127 and economic networks that came together when the Southern Pacific Railway Co. used its networks of power to secure corporations the right to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This legal event was made possible by legions of actants that garnered enough rhetorical force to rearticulate the Equal Protection Clause as a right earned by corporations. To conceptualize corporations as constitutional subjects, legalists employed the terminology of "corporate personality" to account for the ways these nonhuman actors were really people. A Concise History of Corporate Equalities Under the Law Before the American Civil War, corporations were considered a collective agency of people who came together to amass capital for public projects. Dating back to 17thcentury Europe, countries such as Holland and England developed the corporation to fund trade missions that were otherwise too expensive or uncertain in their outcomes. These governments needed some securities and moreover needed to be sheltered from the liabilities of the charter itself. The British Crown, for instance, could not finance journeys to the New World alone, and it was unwilling to jeopardize so much capital at the risk of total failure, so it designed a public-private partnership, known as the joint-stock company, to assemble capital from investors willing to help fund the explorations without risking total loss of capital (Chaudhuri, 1965). After all, the unpredictability of actants such as weather patterns, ship infrastructure, and resources in the New World potentially threatened the entire operation. The English tradition of chartering corporations for specific public duties carried over to the North American continent once the original colonies were established. Indeed, for many years, the corporation had nothing at all to do with profit since they were |
