Those who consider tomatoes a vegetable can cite support from an unexpected source. It was legally declared such by the US Supreme Court in 1893 (Nix v. Hedden).
During the Civil War, when Union markets were cut off from Confederate produce, this need was backfilled by growers in the Caribbean. After the end of Reconstruction, a tariff was placed on imported vegetables, to help southern growers recover. The application of tariff to tomatoes was challenged, on the basis that tomatoes are a fruit (indisputable from a botanical perspective, less so in culinary practice).
In 1893, the Supreme Court put culinary usage (and powerful agricultural interests) ahead of science, and declared that, legally at least, tomatoes are vegetables.
This is the same court which had ruled seven years earlier that corporations are people (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad), so their tendency to weigh commercial interests over reality was already established.
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Actually, the Supreme Court did NOT rule that corporations are people in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Counsel for the railroad framed the issue as whether the state violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (you know, the clause intended to protect minorities from invidious discrimination) when it taxed the property of railroads at their full value without deducting indebtedness on the property. Individual taxpayers and non-railroad corporations were required, in effect, to pay taxes only on their equity rather than the full assessed value of their property.
ReplyDeleteThe court explicitly refused to address the Equal Protection question. Until recently, it has been the wise practice of the Court to decide cases on the narrowest grounds possible to avoid setting precedents that might have inappropriately far-reaching impact and unanticipated consequences. Accordingly, the court in Santa Clara based its decision on a very narrow question of California law.
So why do people keep pointing to Santa Clara as the source of the corporate personhood notion? Well, in the syllabus to the case--which is sort of a summary or abstract which is not part of the opinion--a court employee wrote:
"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."
The Chief Justice (not the Court) sent a note to the employee agreeing that the statement was accurate and giving the employee discretion about whether to include the statement in the syllabus.
First, the syllabus is not law. The holding, stated in the court's opinion, is law.
Second, the opinion did not at any point--much less in its holding--state that the court had decided that the EP clause applied to corporations.
Third, even if the court had held that the EP applied to the railroads in the case, the precedent established would only be something like: States may discriminate against railroads in property tax assessment. It cannot reasonably be read, as some contemporary activist judges and corporatist media propagandists would have it, to affirm a sweeping claim of legal personhood.
Thanks for that, Mary Anne. I had heard before that 'corporate personhood' wasn't actually part of that ruling, but that it was part of some corollary documentation. I appreciate getting the details.
ReplyDeleteI guess that makes it sort of weird that a non-existent element of a ruling would be combined with a second, bad (or also misinterpreted?) ruling that 'money equals speech' to create as bizarre and corrupt a hybrid as the so-called People United ruling.
I agree; it's a huge stretch! If the court had addressed the Equal Protection issue and decided in favor of the railroad on that basis, we might have even agreed that the state should tax the property of all corporations by the same rules rather than singling out one kind of corporation--railroads--for a higher level of property taxation. Maybe we might agree that all property, whether held by individuals or corporations should be subject to the same tax assessment rules. But even if we agreed to that (though that's not really what the EP clause is for), how would we leap from that to the idea that money is speech, and those who have the most money get to have the loudest, most powerful speech?
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