The corporation in the nineteenth-century American imagination

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 See also RE Seavoy, ‘The Public Service Origins of the American Business Corporation’ (1978) 52 The Business History Review 30.

2 See, in general terms, WE Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law. The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (University of Georgia Press 1994). More specifically, on the Americanisation of the corporation form see Pauline Miller, ‘The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation’ (1993) 50 The William and Mary Quarterly 51; Richard Sylla, ‘How the American Corporation Evolved Over Two Centuries’ (2014) 158 Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 354.

3 See e.g. McCulloch v Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819) (federal power rerlted to incorporation); Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. (11 Pet.) 420 (1837) (on corporations’ vested rights); Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston R. Co. v. Letson, 43 U.S. 497 (1844) (on corporations as separate entities enjoying the citizenship of the state of incorporation); Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886) and San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 116 U.S. 138 (1885) (on constitutional protections for corporations); Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1876) (on Congress power to regulate private corporations affecting ‘the common good’; Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904) (on mergers).

4 Likewise, Mueller deploys HR Robinson’s vignette ‘General Jackson Slaying the Many-Headed Monster’ (1836). With its veto, the President confronts a hydra, each head of whuch represents each one of the Second Bank’s state branch corporate agents (71-72).

5 77 Eng Rep 960: Corporations ‘may not commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls … A Corporation aggregate of many cannot do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear’ (emphasis added).

6 RS Levine, ‘“Soulless Corporation”: Oligarchy and the Countersubversive Presence in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo’ in Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (CUP 1989) 58–103.

7 For more on this see Stefanie Mueller, The Silence of the Soulless Corporation: Corporate Agency in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (2022) 34 Law & Literature 23.

8 94 U.S. 113 (1876) at 132.

9 Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (Doubleday 1901).

10 Louis K. Liggett Co. v Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933) at 567. There, Brandeis refers (footnote 57) to IM Wormser, Frankenstein, Incorporated (McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc. 1931).

11 See Matteo Nicolini, ‘The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre’ (2022) 16 Law and Humanities, 16:1, 149.