Corporate Personhood and Limited Sovereignty

This Article, written for a symposium celebrating the work of Professor Margaret Blair, examines how corporate rights jurisprudence helped to shape the corporate form in the United States during the nineteenth century. It argues that as the corporate form became popular because of the way it facilit...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Vanderbilt law review 2021-11, Vol.74 (6), p.1727-1753
Main Author: Pollman, Elizabeth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Balance of power
Blair, Margaret M
Case law
Charters
Constitution-US
Constitutional law
Federalism
History
Incorporation
Interpretation and construction
Jurisprudence
Juristic persons
Laws, regulations and rules
Organizational structure
Personhood
Sovereignty
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This Article, written for a symposium celebrating the work of Professor Margaret Blair, examines how corporate rights jurisprudence helped to shape the corporate form in the United States during the nineteenth century. It argues that as the corporate form became popular because of the way it facilitated capital lock-in, perpetual succession, and provided other favorable characteristics related to legal personality that separated the corporation from its participants, the Supreme Court provided crucial reinforcement of these entity features by recognizing corporations as rights-bearing legal persons separate from the government. Although the legal personality of corporations is a distinct concept from their constitutional treatment, the Court's nineteenth-century rulings bolstered key features created by corporate law and simultaneously situated the corporation as subordinate to the state in a system of federalism. And, finally, the Article suggests that the balance of power struck in the first century of Supreme Court jurisprudence on corporate rights has been eroded in the modern era. The Supreme Court's failure to develop a consistent approach to corporate rights questions and its tendency to reason based on views of corporations as associations of persons have exposed a significant flaw in the Court's evolving corporate personhood jurisprudence: it lacks a limiting principle.
ISSN:0042-2533
1942-9886