14th Amendment

Paul Henry Rosenberg rad at gte.net
Tue May 18 14:05:18 PDT 1999


Michael Perelman wrote:


> I have my own 14 Amendment question: Louis Hacker said that the authors of
> the amendment were railroad attorneys who were intentionally lay the
> groundwork for the eventual interpretation of corporations as people.
> Does anyone have information on that subject?

Only from memory. I read an article about 5 years ago or so which argued that this account was mistaken. Yes, there were some people involved who either were, or shortly became railroad lawyers, but this argument was constructed to JUSTIFY the Supreme Court holding that corporations are people.

Thus, the origins of this argument are not an unmasking of elite perfidy, but a promotion of it!

The article I read went into some detail to show that this account was mistaken in a number of ways. For example, as I recall, one of the arguments put forward was over the use of the word "persons" rather than "citizens," (again, this is from memor, it might have been another term) and the author went into counter-arguments about why this did not have the significance imputed to it, as well as tracing the change to different people than were supposed to have been responsible for it.

I'm sorry, but I can't for the life of me remember where I read it or who wrote it, beyond the vague belief that it was an article from a history journal reprinted in a book. I assume there's more than one article on the topic, so anyone with the right database access should be able to follow this up. It HAS been looked into.

-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net

"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list