Networks of corporate subjectivity: Southern Pacific, Rio Tinto, BP and the rhetorical emergence of the corporate subject

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129 New Hampshire could not appoint state-sanctioned trustees to the college because Dartmouth was rendered a corporation with contract rights that exceeded the laws of the state (Stites, 1972). This decision, consistent with Fletcher v. Peck (1810),22 set in motion a new network of private corporate actors that would eventually supersede governmental regulations once emerging as natural entities. In the context of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886), Dartmouth College was used as a precedent to allow corporations to function as individuals in the face of states attempting to regulate their charters. Importantly, however, Chief Justice Marshall's majority opinion purported what is known as the grant theory of corporate law, which would later come under scrutiny by Legal Realists. Marshall wrote: A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819, 636) This perspective was challenged by realists who advanced a natural entity perspective. This viewpoint saw corporations as real as persons because of their material involvement in social and economic hemispheres of American life. To understand how this transformation in opinion happened, it must be realized that the Second Industrial Revolution and the Civil War created new demands for corporate enterprises, since individual manpower was not enough to sustain the demands for productivity. Industrial corporations were becoming an essential component of the postwar economy because they were able to repurpose their objectives to help America progress, and they received 22 Fletcher v. Peck basically decided that states could not invalidate contracts no matter how they were solicited.