Corporate attorneys harnessed the Fourteenth Amendment to strengthen business interests

Evidence

After the Civil War, legal provisions originally developed to protect slavery were extended to strengthen corporate interests and promote laissez-faire capitalism. The Fifth Amendment’s language protecting private property resurfaced in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified during Reconstruction, which established legal and civil rights for Black Americans by mandating “equal protection of the laws” and prohibiting states from denying people “life, liberty, or property, without due process.” It didn’t take long for corporate attorneys to realize that the Fourteenth Amendment could help strengthen business interests too. This was affirmed in 1886 by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who plainly stated before oral arguments for Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. that the Supreme Court believed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations as well as to people. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in origin stories as infrastructure — the Fourteenth Amendment’s design for Black freedom was repurposed for corporate power, a deviation-from-design reading. — connects to: Powerful corporations have long used the Constitution to fight regulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 353
• SEED: This is a case-in-point for ‘origin stories are infrastructure’ — the same amendment’s origin (Reconstruction) gets re-read as warranting corporate personhood, showing how origin dating determines what counts as design.