Corporate personhood discourse entered common law around 1900 via Maitland.

Evidence

Almost any modern definition of a corporation presumes it to be legally equivalent to a person, though the discourse of corporate personhood was only popularized in the United States and other Anglophone countries around 1900, through the writings of English legal historian Frederic William Maitland and his summarizing of corporate personhood as accepted in common law. “The corporation is (forgive this compound adjective) a right-and-duty-bearing unit,” Maitland wrote, noting that the rights afforded this corporate “person” were not precisely the same as other “persons.” A corporation could not be married, for instance. Yet, Maitland claimed, when it comes to questions of law and state, “in a vast number of cases you can make a legal statement about x and y which will hold good whether these symbols stand for two men or for two corporations, or for a corporation and a man.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 378

Categorization

• DEFINE: Dates and names the origin of corporate personhood discourse in Anglophone common law.
• XREF: Feeds the Corpocene explanation of how the company acquired a person’s form.