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Show 147 individuals, rather than just an aggregate of individuals. Demonstrating that corporations were actually more than the sum of their parts was the challenge for Legal Realists since the individual, as a unit, was a fundamental starting point for American legal theory. If these advocates could somehow show that corporations were real individuals, and not just artificial entities created by the state for special purposes, then they were more likely to expand the equal protection clause in their favor. Before Santa Clara, after all, corporations had been created by states for specific public duties. The question of whether the equal protection clause extended to these companies thus occurred at a time of explosive economic growth, since the postwar American economy was beginning to prosper from natural resource extraction, new manufacturing firms, and the American railway system that networked these relations from coast to coast. Consequently, corporations did not have to wait for the courts to decide the boundaries of their ontological existence because industries, especially railroad companies, were already performing their subjectivity. Consequently, a growing number of political and legal thinkers, corporate apologists, and private interests realized that a formalist interpretation of the law no longer applied to how the world was actually functioning. Corporations, after all, seemed to outlive their limited charters by forcefully creating their own networks. Thus, the Legal Realists emerged as early as 1881, when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1881/2009) released The Common Law, and asserted that corporations qualify as real entities, making them individuals protected by the constitution. The Legal Realists supported this argument with work done overseas by German |
