On the "Palin Can't Name a Supreme Court Case" meme

[acroyear]

yeah, i know most of you would expect me to mention Edwards or other cases around the creationism debate, or even Loving which I've mentioned before, but no, one actually is bigger to me.  The odd part is not what the court decided itself, but how bad reporting on an issue and a case can actually influence how a case is interpreted by future judges and lawyers.  The case in question is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which is often considered to be the "corporations are artificial people" case.  As Cecil describes:

The Straight Dope: How can a corporation be legally considered a person?:

Most people have a general idea what corporations are. Some may even know that, for most of U.S. history, corporations have been considered "artificial persons." The concept isn't as nutty as it sounds. From a legal standpoint, corporations can do many of the same things that natural persons do--buy and sell property, hire and fire, sue and be sued, and so on.

What most people don't know is that after the above-mentioned 1886 decision, artificial persons were held to have exactly the same legal rights as we natural folk. (Not to mention the clear advantages corporations enjoy: they can be in several places at once, for instance, and at least in theory they're immortal.) Up until the New Deal, many laws regulating corporations were struck down under the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment--in fact, that clause was invoked far more often on behalf of corporations than former slaves. Although the doctrine of personhood has been weakened since, even now lawyers argue that an attempt to sue a corporation for lying is an unconstitutional infringement on its First Amendment right to free speech. (This year, for example, we saw Nike v. Kasky.)

You're thinking: By what tortured reasoning did the Supreme Court decide that corporations were protected by the 14th Amendment, which everyone knows was enacted to protect the rights of real people? Answer: Apparently it didn't decide. As revealed by our friend bex--and detailed by Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (2002)--the whole thing began as a courtroom comment by a judge, which was elevated to the status of legal precedent by an overreaching court reporter.

Here's what happened. Santa Clara County in California was trying to levy a property tax against the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad gave numerous reasons why it shouldn't have to pay, one of which rested on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause: the railroad was being held to a different standard than human taxpayers.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite supposedly prefaced the proceedings by saying, "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In its published opinion, however, the court ducked the personhood issue, deciding the case on other grounds.

Then the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, stepped in. Although the title makes him sound like a mere clerk, the court reporter is an important official who digests dense rulings and summarizes key findings in published "headnotes." (Davis had already had a long career in public service, and at one point was president of the board of directors for the Newburgh & New York Railroad Company.) In a letter, Davis asked Waite whether he could include the latter's courtroom comment--which would ordinarily never see print--in the headnotes. Waite gave an ambivalent response that Davis took as a yes. Eureka, instant landmark ruling.

Does this flaky procedure mean all later cases relying on Santa Clara are null and void? Nope--in the world of the law, a precedent is a precedent, even if it's a stupid one. However, Hartmann's book has caused a stir in legal circles, and some hope the Supreme Court will take another look at corporate personhood. A few naifs think a reversal will spell the end of global corporate tyranny. Ain't gonna happen--fact is, the courts have been chipping away at corporate personhood for years, and you don't exactly see our capitalist overlords suffering from it. But it'd be nice to have a clear-cut ruling, say, that limiting campaign contributions by big businesses doesn't mean you're restricting their First Amendment rights.

There are other issues about this ruling that are important side effects of this decision, to me as a supporter of culture, but also of the clearly written intentions of the Constitutional Framers that copyright be limited.  When the copyright expiration limit was rewritten to be "X years after the death of the creator", the combination of that plus the fact of corporate ownership of assets (effectively reinforced by this decision, but it had, of course, always existed), means that copyright quite simply will never ever expire again.

Nothing is "owned" by people.  Everything is owned by a holding company, and then that holding company is owned by an estate, and the estate itself is formed as a corporation, so it quite simply never dies.

Ever.

There are some trickeries involved in corporate law, both here and in the UK (where similar decisions are the reason why Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes both remain firmly in the hands of corporations and not in the public domain), involving when a corporation is bought out (or has its "assets" bought out as the term usually is for a failed venture) that make things very tricky in terms of figuring when a corporation is actually really "dead".  The entities often do exist, in some limited legal bureaucratic form, simply to make sure such connections between the corporation and ownership are never lost.  For example, the British East India Company actually does still exist as 5 accountants whose sole job is to keep track of all of the assets the company has had over the centuries just in case some legal question of ownership ever arises.  Similar "departments" still exist in what's left of HP to track the assets of DEC, Compaq, and Wang (and the myriad other entities subsumed over the last 2 decades).

So nothing dies, and as such, nothing is ever "free" again even though that is quite clearly what the framers wanted and coded into our Constitution.