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Show 141 2002). The other 135 cases involved corporations who were seeking to attain their own freedoms and equalities from state regulation. Thus, even though the Fourteenth Amendment may have been intended to protect the equality of Black people, they were obviously not the only actors articulated by this postwar amendment. Indeed, while political debates about how to best reconstruct the nation were swirling around the country, elite stakeholders invested in the expanding industrial economy tested the Supreme Court by arguing that corporations also deserved equal protection under the U.S. Constitution. This argument became particularly forceful in 1886 when the Southern Pacific Railway won its case for economic equality in the state of California. Although the case may have seemed insignificant, or even commonsensical, at the time, it was nonetheless a pivotal event for corporate equality within the legal arena because it catalyzed an entire assemblage of relations between corporations and the law. The case involved the ability of the state of California to tax railroad properties, including fences. During the California Constitutional Convention of 1879-1879, state legislatures determined that railroad companies could not "deduct the amount of their debts [i.e., mortgages] from the taxable value of their property, a right which was given to individuals" (Constitutional Convention, 1878/2013). Matters began when the Southern Pacific Railroad Company refused to pay their taxes under these new constitutional addendums. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. was a product of a host of alliances that labored to expand the equalities of the Reconstruction Amendments to corporations. What is interesting, however, is that the declaration that |
