Over 130 years ago, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company pulled off a major victory for the private market in its lawsuit against Santa Clara, California. Essentially, the case established that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations just as much as people, setting the stage for a legal concept known as “corporate personhood.”
The United States — and indeed, the world — is still ruled by this archaic principle, which empowers powerful tech corporations to flaunt basic government regulations citing the same protections enjoyed by private citizens. This manifests in the way companies mine private consumer data, deny employees healthcare, defy public health initiatives — and, of course, exert massive influence in elections.
Sure enough, Supreme Court cases involving private companies overwhelmingly shake out in favor of moneyed interests as a result corporate personhood. Yet if corporations are people — who in many US states are still subject to the death penalty — then can’t we technically sentence companies that commit egregious crimes to capital punishment?
In theory, we can. As Salon observed, the concept of a corporate death penalty, officially known as “judicial dissolution,” has roots going back nearly just as far as corporate personhood.
Way back in 1887, 17 major sugar refineries hatched a greedy plan to combine their operations into one single trust, effectively creating the world’s largest sugar monopoly. Known as the North River Sugar Refining Corporation, the ensuing cartel was forced to liquidate itself just two years later by the New York Supreme Court, on the grounds that it had abused its corporate charter by centralizing power and fixing prices.
It’s a pretty specific case, but it formed a foundational precedent for US anti-trust law, showing the power a single state could theoretically wield to protect citizens from corporate harm.
As the presiding judge declared at the time, per Salon: “the life of a corporation is indeed less than that of the humblest citizen.”
Since that time, rulings making use of this corporate death penalty have been vanishingly rare. The most recent study on the use of judicial disillusionment, penned in 2012, found that “no publicly traded company failed because of a conviction in the years 2001-2010.”
Yet if there was ever a time to bring back the corporate death penalty, it’s now: tech companies are steamrolling towns to dump data centers wherever they please; AI companies are compiling enough private data to rival the NSA; and social media platforms like Facebook are quite literally enabling genocide.
While the extremely conservative US Supreme Court isn’t likely to bite on this any time soon, the fact remains: they could, if only they faced a little extra-judicial pressure.
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