Roscoe Conkling's Fraudulent Argument for Corporate Personhood in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific

Former U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, who had twice refused Supreme Court appointments to pursue his lucrative Gilded Age law practice, argued before the Court in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers intentionally used “person” rather than “citizen” to extend constitutional protections to corporations. As the last surviving member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that drafted the Amendment, Conkling presented a journal purporting to show the drafting committee deliberately chose language to cover corporations. Legal historian Howard Jay Graham later studied Conkling’s claims and concluded they were “a deliberate, brazen forgery”—the Amendment’s language had never been revised to cover corporations, and the drafting committee had consistently used “person” from the beginning. The justices were initially skeptical, and the case was dismissed due to a stipulation between parties before a ruling. However, Conkling’s fraudulent argument planted the seed for corporate personhood doctrine. Four years later, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), a court reporter’s headnote would cite similar reasoning to establish corporate personhood as precedent, despite the Court never ruling on the issue. This represents one of the most successful acts of legal fraud in American history, fundamentally reshaping constitutional law to favor corporate power over the rights of freed slaves for whom the Fourteenth Amendment was actually intended.