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Show 146 turn to one of the key arguments presented in County of San Mateo v. Southern Pacific R. Co. case, which if the reader recalls, preceded Santa Clara by four years in the California Circuit Court. In this 1882 case, California lawyer John Norton Pomeroy, serving as a counsel to the case, argued that corporations must be considered legal persons because behind every corporation is a human subject with constitutional rights. Moreover, these corporations, as imaginary or abstract as they may be, still possess real property rights that cannot be deprived by the states. I quote his argument at length: Whatever be the legal nature of a corporation as an artificial, metaphysical being, separate and distinct from the individual members, and whatever distinctions the common law makes, in carrying out the technical legal conception, between property of the corporation and that of the individual members, still, in applying the fundamental guaranties of the constitution, and in thus protecting the rights of property, these metaphysical and technical notions must give way to the reality. The truth cannot be evaded that, for the purpose of protecting rights, the property of all business and trading corporations is the property of the individual corporators. A state act depriving a business corporation of its property without due process of law, does, in fact, deprive the individual corporators of their property. In this sense, and within the scope of these grand safeguards of private rights, there is no real distinction between artificial persons, or corporations, and natural persons (County of San Mateo v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 1882, p. 758). It is quite clear that the premise of this argument hinges quite heavily on the realist viewpoint that corporations, whether metaphysical or material, own actual property in the state of California. As the debates about corporate ontology progressed throughout this time, it is evident that Legal Realists were eventually able to gain the upper hand by demonstrating that corporations are real and natural as opposed to metaphysical or artificial. The implications that came along with this real entity, or natural entity theory, of "corporate personality" were pivotal to the constitutional corporate subject because these assumptions propelled a viewpoint that corporations actually had a life of their own, as |
