The Virginia Law Review has published "Frankenstein’s Baby: The Forgotten History of Corporations, Race, and Equal Protection," by Evelyn Atkinson (University of Chicago). The abstract:
This Article highlights the crucial role corporations played in crafting an expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Exposing the role of race in the history of the constitutional law of corporate personhood for the first time, this Article argues that corporations were instrumental in laying the foundation of the Equal Protection Clause that underlies civil rights jurisprudence today. By simultaneously bringing cases involving both corporations and Chinese immigrants, corporate lawyers and sympathetic federal judges crafted a broad interpretation of equal protection in order to draw a through-line from African Americans, to Chinese immigrants, and finally to corporate shareholders. At the same time that corporate litigation expanded the umbrella of protected “persons,” however, it limited the capacity of the Fourteenth Amendment to address issues of substantive inequality.
This Article reveals that central to the argument in favor of corporate constitutional personhood was a direct analogy between corporate shareholders and racial minorities. This Article thus highlights the intersection of corporate personhood and race, a connection that has rarely, if ever, been explored. Corporate lawyers’ expansive interpretation of equal protection ultimately triumphed in the Supreme Court with the twin cases of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a bedrock of modern civil rights doctrine, and Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, a case credited with extending equal protection rights to corporations. This is the first Article to juxtapose these two seminal cases and to expose the deep and long-standing connections between them. In so doing, this Article uncovers a neglected history of the link between corporations and race, as well as a lost history of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The full article is available here.
-- Karen Tani
