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Show 151 law,' arbitrarily crafting public policy through the decisions they rendered" (p. 436). The realists were right. Conclusion: Reflections on the Force of the Law Although debates about the legal ontology of corporations are still not yet entirely settled, 19th-century legalists established important precedents about the corporate personhood thesis. At the time, it was reasonable for Supreme Court justices to assume corporations were constitutional subjects because railway companies had already performed subjective agency by transforming the speeds and intensities of postwar America. Did the framers of the Fourteenth intend to include corporations? No, probably not, but as this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, the force of the law is not contained. Intentionality is a figure of the imagination. What matters most when considering the force of the law is how various actors create networks with allies to forcefully assemble new social relations. This is what happened with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. While conservative legalists held on to this "grant theory" of corporations, which recognized corporations as artificial creatures restricted to limited state charters, the world outside of the Court was developing a new set of relations that were beyond the control of the courts. As the 19th century expanded its industrial economy, and publics and politicians saw the potential of corporations - especially the railway networks - to state and national economies, the practice of free incorporation became more and more a common way of doing business. Even when the San Mateo decision was made, the Court recognized that the state of California alone had over 5,000 corporations (San Mateo, 1882, p. 789). |
