This question has been bothering me for years, so forgive me if I previously asked some variant of it…A professor once made and off the cuff remark that something like 90+% of the cases involving the 14th amendment brought before the supreme court before 1900 were regarding corporations as citizens and resulted in giving corporations more rights. Very few, he claimed, were actually for giving human beings equal rights as citizens.
How true is this? Not at all? Somewhat? Very?
FWIW, as an aside, the class was US constitutional law history 1865-1945, the professor was Milton Cantor. The year was 2002, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I don’t want to give prof Cantor a bad name, so if this turns out to be complete bs, I’ll just assume I misheard or misunderstood him or something.
If this is true, your professor was right on the money. (PDF)
Hell, the first big cases heard by the Supreme Court on the 14th Amendment were the Slaughter-House cases, where they gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause, arguably the most important part of the 14th Amendment at that time.
Hey, there ya go. He may have been a crank, but I actually found that class interesting. Sweet, thank you. I had once mentioned it to my own students while on a tangent from an unrelated issue, but I then retracted and told them I wasn’t sure. I figured before I mention it again, I’d better make absolutely sure it is true. Otherwise it would not only be wrong in many ways to give students incorrect information, this particular piece of information might come across as “socialist propaganda” to some people.
I’m amazed that this got answered so succinctly and quickly, I should have asked years ago. Thank you very much, good sir!
I don’t doubt that the general gist of the source cited by Airman Doors is accurate, but it contains at least one mistake of fact: The story about the death of Charles Drew appears to be an urban legend.