Reply #44: I have to agree with the other lawyers in this thread. This is a silly myth. Headnotes are not law.

[HamdenRice]

I'll try to make this as straightforward as possible. A reporter is a person or company who takes court opinions -- written and printed by the court itself -- and reprints them, and binds them into books, which are then sold to lawyers and judges chambers.

Back in those days before the internet and "search" functions, it was very, very important that cases be indexed. An opinion was useless, unless a lawyer or subsequent judge could find it -- in the example, under some heading like "Taxes--corporations," or "Fourteenth Amendment--corporations".

So that the lawyers and later judges don't have to read the entire case, the reporters add "headnotes," which are part index and part summary of the opinion. They appear in the reporters' books just before the reprint of the courts official opinion.

Headnotes are notoriously bad. Always have been. They are not law. They are part of the indexing system and a sort of summary to enable the lawyer or judge to determine whether to read the whole case opinion.

So this story is about a possibly biased reporter misunderstanding or maybe even intentionally misinterpreting the opinion, which was printed by the court, and putting it in his book as a headnote.

This may have influenced subsequent judges, in the sense of putting an idea in their heads, but it is the opinions of subsequent judges agreeing that corporations are persons that count -- not the headnotes. If subsequent judges mis-cite Santa Clara, so what? It's the subsequent judges' opinions that made and ratified the rule of law that corporations are persons. The idea would have been adopted by some other court somewhere else because it was clearly being talked about by lots of lawyers and judges -- how to sue corporations and allow them to be sued.

Another myth is that corporations are persons for all purposes, just like natural persons, and have all the rights of natural persons.

That has never, ever been true. If that were true, there wouldn't be a "corporate tax" separate from "income tax," nor would there be much relaxed rules on regulating what corporations say under the "commercial speech" doctrine that distinguishes "free speech" of natural persons from the "commercial speech" of corporations.

If corporations weren't persons for limited purposes you wouldn't be able to sue them for things like defective products.