We the Corporations

by Adam Winkler

  42. On Field’s first trip to California, see Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law, 24–26. On railroad freight, see Justice Field’s circuit court opinion in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 18 F. 385 (Circuit Court, D. California, [1883]).

  43. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 400.

  44. On Field’s inappropriate involvement with Stanford, see Kens, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty, 239–240; Howard Jay Graham, “Four Letters of Mr. Justice Field,” 47 Yale Law Journal 1100, 1106 (1938).

  45. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 426.

  46. Ibid., 437 n. 155.

  47. See Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 18 F. 385 (Circuit Court, D. California [1883]. See also Harkins, “The Uneasy Relationship.”

  48. See Morton J. Horwitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,” 88 West Virginia Law Review 173 (1985–1986); Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” 54 University of Chicago Law Review 1447 (1987). See also Herbert Hovenkamp, “The Classical Corporation in American Legal Thought,” 76 Georgetown Law Journal 1593, 1630–1632 (1988) (on the railroads’ association-based portrayal of the corporation in another series of cases decided in the Gilded Age).

  49. See Paul v. Virginia, 75 U.S. 168 (1868).

  50. See Welton v. Missouri, 91 U.S. 275 (1876).

  51. See Timothy L. Hall, “Morrison Remick Waite,” in Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary, 168–172.

  52. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 563; Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1876).

  53. See Hall, “Morrison Remick Waite,” 171; Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 570.

  54. See Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886).

  55. See San Bernardino County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 417 (1886) (Field, J., concurring).

  56. On the Supreme Court reporter, see Frank D. Wagner, “The Role of the Supreme Court Reporter in History,” 26 Journal of Supreme Court History 9 (2001).

  57. On Davis, see John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, “J. C. Bancroft Davis,” in American National Biography (1999), 6:168; Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—And How You Can Fight Back (2d ed., 2010), 44–48.

  58. On the growth of law schools and the transformation of legal practice in the late 1800s, see Lawrence M. Friedman, History of American Law (rev. ed., 2010), 606 et seq. On public libraries, United States Office of Education, Public Libraries in the United States of America (1876), 778.

  59. On Davis’s strained relationship with the justices, see James W. Ely, The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888–1910 (1995), 49; Loren P. Beth, John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice (1992), 164–165. On Davis’s controversial list, see Charles A. Beard and Alan F. Westin, The Supreme Court and the Constitution (1912), 17–18.

  60. Harlan’s complaint is reported in Beth, John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice, 165. Brewer’s rebuke appeared in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906).

  61. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 566.

  62. See Harkins, “The Uneasy Relationship,” 249–250.

  63. On “Ninth Circuit Law,” see Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 570–575. On Field’s racism, see Thomas Wuil Joo, “New ‘Conspiracy Theory’ of the Fourteenth Amendment: Nineteenth Century Chinese Civil Rights Cases and the Development of Substantive Due Process Jurisprudence,” 29 University of San Francisco Law Review 353 (1995).

  64. See Graham, Everyman’s Constitution, 137; Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905); E. S. Corwin, “The Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment,” 7 Michigan Law Review 643, 653 (1909). The 1897 case was Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578 (1897).

  65. See Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Company v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181 (1888).

  66. On Fuller, see Ely, The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller. On the incorporation of Mark Twain, see “Mark Twain Turns Into A Corporation,” New York Times, December 24, 1908; “In Vacation,” 15 Virginia Law Register 982 (1910).

  67. Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Co. v. Beckwith, 129 U.S. 26 (1889) (citations omitted).

  68. On the publication process of Supreme Court opinions, see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Informing the Public About the Supreme Court’s Work,” 29 Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 275 (1998), 283 (“There was a long time in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history, indeed until Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s 1888–1910 tenure, during which justices did not routinely circulate their draft opinions among their colleagues prior to delivery”). See also Harkins, “The Uneasy Relationship,” 286–287.

  69. For illustrative opinions citing Santa Clara, see Charlotte, C. & A. R. Co. v. Gibbes, 142 U.S. 386, 391 (1892); Covington & Lexington Turnpike Road Co. v. Sanford, 164 U.S. 578, 592 (1896); Gulf, C. & S. F. R. Co. v. Ellis, 165 U.S. 150, 154 (1897); Smyth v. Ames, 169 U.S. 466, 522 (1898); Blake v. McClung, 172 U.S. 239, 259 (1898); Kentucky Finance Corp. v. Paramount Auto Exchange Corp., 262 U.S. 544, 550 (1923).

  70. See Charles Wallace Collins, The Fourteenth Amendment and the States (1912), 129–138. Illustrative cases include Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578 (1897); Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905); Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908); Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915); and Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918).

  71. See Collins, The Fourteenth Amendment, 126, 127 n. 1 (quoting Arthur T. Hadley); Charles Wallace Collins, Whither the Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations (1947); Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right (2008), 11–29; Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes, “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Language, Culture, and Political Change,” in Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, ed. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman (2008), 199, 206.

  72. See Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi Lamoreaux, “Corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment,” in Corporations and American Democracy, ed. Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak (2017), 286.

  73. See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Collins, The Fourteenth Amendment, 137–138.

  CHAPTER 5: THE CORPORATE CRIMINAL

  1. See DeLancey Nicoll, 3 Representative Men of New York: A Record of their Achievements, ed. Jay Henry Mowbray (1898), 130; Fred C. Kelly, The Wright Brothers: A Biography (2012), 269; Dan H. McCullough, “The Sunset of the Criminal Lawyer,” 50 American Bar Association Journal 223 (1964); George Derby and James Terry White, “De Lancey Nicoll,” in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1910), 14:297. On Hale, see “Trusted Men in Jail for Large Defalcation,” New York Times, September 29, 1905.

  2. See generally Transcript of Record, Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906).

  3. On Taft, see Henry Waters Taft, Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased During the Year 1945–1946, Bulletin of Yale University 7 (1947). See also Henry Waters Taft, “The Tobacco Trust Decisions,” 6 Columbia Law Review 375 (1906).

  4. See Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (2011).

  5. See Theodore Roosevelt, State of the Union Message, December 3, 1901, available at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/sotu1.pdf; Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (1996), 46.

  6. See Kathleen F. Brickey, “Corporate Criminal Accountability: A Brief History and an Observation,” 60 Washington University Law Quarterly 393 (1982), 396.

  7. See Helen Silving, “The Oath: I,” 68 Yale Law Journal 1329 (1959), 1361–1364.

  8. See “Trusted Men in Jail for Large Defalcation.” The transcript of the grand jury proceeding can be found in Transcript of Record, Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906).

  9. On licorice, see Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 48; Rosemarie Boucher Leenerts, “Licorice,” in Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia, ed. Christopher Martin Cumo (2013), 579.

  10. O
n Duke, see Robert F. Durden, Bold Entrepreneur: The Life of James B. Duke (2003); “Tobacco Trust,” in Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, ed. Thomas Carson et al. (1999), 1008; Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 30 et seq.; “Tobacco Trust Tells Its Plan,” New York Times, October 15, 1911.

  11. On Dodd, see John M. Dobson, Bulls, Bears, Boom, and Bust: A Historical Encyclopedia of American Business Concepts (2007), 203.

  12. On the knights and the rise of trust law, see David A. Thomas, “Anglo-American Land Law: Diverging Developments from a Shared History,” 34 Real Property, Probate, and Trust Journal 143 (1999).

  13. Charles R. Geisst, Wall Street: A History (1997), 100, 106; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (1992), 80.

  14. See Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960, 83–87; Ralph Nader et al., Taming the Giant Corporation (1976), 52.

  15. See Dobson, Bulls, Bears, Boom, and Bust, 203; Geisst, Wall Street: A History, 100, 106; Charles F. “Bostwick, Legislative Competition for Corporate Capital,” 7 American Lawyer 136, 140 (1899); Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960, 83–84.

  16. On the race to the bottom, see William L. Cary, “Federalism and Corporate Law: Reflections Upon Delaware,” 83 Yale Law Journal 663, 666 (1974). On Delaware, see Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012.

  17. See “Tobacco Trust,” Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, ed. Thomas Carson et al. (1999), 1008.

  18. American Tobacco’s purchase of MacAndrews and Forbes is detailed in court opinions, including United States v. American Tobacco, 221 U.S. 106 (1911) and United States v. MacAndrews & Forbes Co., 140 F. 823 (S.D. N.Y. 1906).

  19. On Lloyd, see John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (1983). Lloyd’s exposé of Standard Oil can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1881/03/the-story-of-a-great-monopoly/306019/. On the Sherman Antitrust Act, see “Trust-Busting,” in Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, ed. Thomas Carson et al. (1999), 1025.

  20. See Theodore Roosevelt, State of the Union Message, December 3, 1901, available at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/sotu1.pdf; Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 46.

  21. On indicting a ham sandwich, see Ronald Wright and Marc Miller, “The Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff,” 55 Stanford Law Review 29, 51 n. 70 (2002). On grand juries more generally, see Kevin K. Washburn, “Restoring the Grand Jury,” 76 Fordham Law Review 2333 (2008); Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998), 83–85.

  22. Nicoll’s smoking habit was described in Allan Nevis, “Henry Ford: A Complex Man” in Henry Ford: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management, ed. John Cunningham Wood and Michael C. Wood (2003), 1: 47, 52. His sentiments about criminal justice were recounted in Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “ ‘America’s Greatest Criminal Barracks’: The Tombs and the Experience of Criminal Justice in New York City, 1838–1897,” 29 Journal of Urban History 525 (2003). See also Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence (1966), 62.

  23. See “Witness in Contempt in Tobacco Inquiry,” New York Times, May 9, 1905; “English Anarchist Loses,” New York Times, November 8, 1903.

  24. See Transcript of Record, Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906).

  25. See “Trusted Men in Jail for Large Defalcation.”

  26. On the prevalence of Fourth and Fifth Amendment cases today, see Ashlyn Kuersten and Donald Sonder, Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals (2014), 35.

  27. See Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886). Additional cases included railroad companies. See Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547 (1892); Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591 (1896).

  28. See Brickey, “Corporate Criminal Accountability: A Brief History and an Observation,” 60 Washington University Law Quarterly 393 (1982); Daniel Lipton, “Corporate Capacity for Crime and Politics: Defining Corporate Personhood at the Turn of the 20th Century,” 96 Virginia Law Review 1911, 1954 (2010); William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Robert Malcolm Kerr (1876), 1:464.

  29. See Harold J. Laski, “The Personality of Associations,” 29 Harvard Law Review 404 (1916); John Dewey, “The Historical Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” 35 Yale Law Journal 655 (1926); P. Q. Johnson, “Law and Legal Theory in the History of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood,” 35 Seattle University Law Review 1135 (2012); New York Central & Hudson River Railroad Co. v. United States, 212 U.S. 481 (1909).

  30. See Transcript of Record, Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906).

  31. See Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

  32. See E. Allgeyer & Company v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578 (1897).

  33. On Peckham, see “Rufus Wheeler Peckham, Jr.,” in Melvin Urofsky, The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (2015), 351. On Allgeyer’s influence, and that of the Lochner era it began, see David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (2011).

  34. On Lochner revisionism, see Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner; Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of the Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (1995). For an excellent review of some of the early literature, see Gary D. Rowe, “Lochner Revisionism Revisited,” 24 Law & Social Inquiry 221 (1999).

  35. On the distinction between property rights and liberty rights in the Lochner era, see Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi Lamoreaux, “Corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment,” in Corporations and American Democracy, ed. Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak (2017), 286.

  36. Northwestern National Life Insurance Company v. Riggs, 203 U.S. 243 (1906).

  37. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). On property and liberty rights more generally, see Henry Monagham, “Of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Property,’ ” 62 Cornell Law Review 405, 411–412 (1977); Wayne McCormack, “Property and Liberty: Institutional Competence and the Functions of Rights,” 51 Washington & Lee Law Review 1, 29 (1994).

  38. See Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906); “Federal Jury Indicts Tobacco Trust Men,” New York Times, June 19, 1906.

  39. See Henry Billings Brown and Charles Artemis Kent, Memoir of Henry Billings Brown, Late Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1915), 88; Robert M. Warner, “Henry B. Brown,” in The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, ed. Clare Cushman (2012), 229.

  40. There were pragmatic reasons for Hale’s split outcome on corporate rights. See William J. Stuntz, “Privacy’s Problem and the Law of Criminal Procedure,” 93 Michigan Law Review 1016, 1053–1054 (1995); William J. Stuntz, “The Substantive Origins of Criminal Procedure,” 105 Yale Law Journal 393, 422–433 (1995).

  41. On the property-rights basis of Hale, see Lipton, “Corporate Capacity for Crime and Politics: Defining Corporate Personhood At the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” 96 Virginia Law Review 1911, 1943–1945.

  42. See Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906). On Hale’s recognition of the differences between humans and corporations, see Bloch and Lamoreaux, “Corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment.”

  43. See Roscoe Pound, “Visitatorial Jurisdiction Over Corporations in Equity,” 49 Harvard Law Review 369, 371 (1936); William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Robert Malcolm Kerr (1876), 1:455.

  44. See “Federal Jury Indicts Tobacco Trust Men.”

  45. See United States v. American Tobacco, 221 U.S. 106 (1911); Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911); Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 52–53.

  46. See Colonnade Catering Corp. v. United States, 397 U.S. 72 (1970); United States v. Biswell, 406 U.S. 311 (1972); Marshall v. Barlow’s Inc., 436 U.S. 307 (1978); United States v. Morton Salt Co., 338 U.S. 632 (1950). See Peter J. Henning, “The Conundrum of Corporate Criminal Liability: Seeking A Consistent Approach to the Constitutional Rights of Corporations in Criminal Prosecutions,” 63 Tennessee Law Review 79
3, 802, 826 et seq. (1996); Darrell A. H. Miller, “Guns, Inc.: Citizens United, McDonald, and the Future of Corporate Constitutional Rights,” 86 New York University Law Review 887, 919 (2011). On the application of another criminal right to corporations, see Elizabeth Salisbury Warren, “Note, The Case for Applying the Eighth Amendment to Corporations,” 49 Vanderbilt Law Review 1313 (1996).

  CHAPTER 6: PROPERTY, NOT POLITICS

  1. On the Great Wall Street Scandal and the resulting campaign finance reform, see Adam Winkler, “ ‘Other People’s Money’: Corporations, Agency Costs, and Campaign Finance Law,” 92 Georgetown Law Journal 871 (2004); Morton Keller, The Life Insurance Enterprise, 1885–1910: A Study in the Limits of Corporate Power (1963); “Probing the Insurance Companies,” New York Times, October 1, 1905, 1. On Perkins and the insurance investigation, see John A. Garrity, Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins (1957), 164 et seq.

  2. On Hughes’s being “scarcely known,” see Lindsay Russell, “Charles E. Hughes, The Pilot of the Insurance Investigation,” 17 Green Bag 633 (1905). On Hughes’s lack of affiliation with major firms, see Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925 (1930), 3:51–52. On Hughes’s life and career more generally, see Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956); Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence (1966); Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (1951).

  3. On Perkins, see Garrity, Right-Hand Man; “George W. Perkins,” in Wall Street People: True Stories of the Great Barons of Finance, ed. Charles D. Ellis and James R. Vertin (2001), 2:84–87.

  4. See Winkler, “ ‘Other People’s Money,’ ” 887–888; Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939), 196; Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925: Pre-War America (1930), 3:34.

  5. See Garrity, Right-Hand Man, 165.

  6. Ibid., 166–167.

  7. The account of Perkins and Hughes’s private conversation came from Hughes himself. See The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes, ed. David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin (1973), 125–126.