Editing Morrison Waite (section)

===Role in corporate personhood controversy===
{{see also|Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission}}
In 1885, S. W. Sanderson, who was the Chief Legal Advisor for the Southern Pacific Railroad, decided to sue Santa Clara County in California because it was trying to regulate the railroad's activity.  His claim, in part, was that because a railroad was a '[[person]]' under the Constitution, local governments couldn't '[[Discrimination|discriminate]]' against it by having different laws and taxes in different places.

When ''[[Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company]]'', {{ussc|118|394|1886}}, came before the Court, Sanderson asserted that '[[Corporate personhood|corporate persons]]' should be treated the same as 'natural (or human) persons.' and although the Court specifically did not rule on it, the Reporter of Decisions, [[Bancroft Davis|John Chandler Bancroft Davis]], inserted the following [[dictum]] in the headnotes:<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7FRr5ya2ka8C|title=Everyman's Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the "Conspiracy Theory," and American Constitutionalism|last=Graham|first=Howard Jay|date=May 31, 2013|publisher=Wisconsin Historical Society|isbn=9780870206351|pages=567|language=en|access-date=August 6, 2016|archive-date=December 28, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191228120907/https://books.google.com/books?id=7FRr5ya2ka8C|url-status=live}}</ref>

<blockquote>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.<ref>118 U.S. 394 (1886) – Official court Syllabus in the United States Reports</ref></blockquote>

Before publication, Davis wrote a letter to Waite, dated May 26, 1886, to make sure his headnote was correct, to which Waite replied:

<blockquote>I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.<sup>[[Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.|[4]]]</sup></blockquote>

Hence this ''dictum'' in the headnote and the Waite reply changed the course of history and how [[Corporate personhood debate|corporations came to have the legal rights of a human person]].

[[Thom Hartmann|Thomas Hartmann]], in his book ''Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and Theft of Human Rights'', has the following to say:<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequal-protection/excerpt-theft|title=The Theft of Human Rights, chapter excerpt from Unequal Protection|date=February 11, 2011|language=en-US|access-date=August 6, 2016|archive-date=July 2, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160702122834/http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequal-protection/excerpt-theft|url-status=live}}</ref>

<blockquote>In these two sentences (according to the conventional wisdom), Waite weakened the kind of democratic republic the original authors of the Constitution had envisioned, and set the stage for the future worldwide damage of our environmental, governmental, and cultural commons. The plutocracy that had arisen with the East India Company in 1600, and been fought back by America's Founders, had gained a tool that was to allow them, in the coming decades, to once again gain control of most of North America, and then the world. Ironically, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the years between his proclamation and 1910, only 19 dealt with African Americans: 288 were suits brought by corporations seeking the rights of natural persons.</blockquote>