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Show 149 resounding implications to the formalistic history of Santa Clara (how can the Court ascribe corporations the rights of individuals if they are not yet considered natural entities?), it makes sense from a Latourian perspective, which, I contend, is sympathetic with currents of legal realism. After all, the ontology of corporations as more than "creatures of the state" did not depend on the majority opinion from Santa Clara, since corporations had already forcefully assembled relations beyond the legal arena, which made them real to American populations even if the Court had not yet caught up with the times. What Santa Clara did do, however, was create an entirely new legal assemblage that established new associations among another network that would only expand in the future. At the time, though, debates about corporate personhood were still under way. While the realists believed that corporations were persons, and thus warranted constitutional protection, upholders of the grant theory projected that corporations were still imaginary "creatures of the state" that existed only under the sovereign authority of governments. Arthur Machen (1911) trenchantly observed this perspectival divide in the Harvard Law Review when he said that the surge of realists believed that "when a company is formed by the union of natural persons, a new real person, a real corporate ‘organism' is brought into being" and that this "corporate organism is an animal: it possesses organs like a human being [and]… it is endowed with a will and with senses" (p. 256). Those attempting to preserve limited corporate charters, however, maintained that corporations are fictitious and artificial, and only exist because the state was benevolent enough to grant them certain special privileges. In the words of Machen (1911), this |
