This Article reveals that central to the argument in favor of corporate constitutional personhood was a direct analogy between corporate shareholders and racial minorities. This Article thus highlights the intersection of corporate personhood and race, a connection that has rarely, if ever, been explored. Corporate lawyers’ expansive interpretation of equal protection ultimately triumphed in the Supreme Court with the twin cases of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a bedrock of modern civil rights doctrine, and Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, a case credited with extending equal protection rights to corporations. This is the first Article to juxtapose these two seminal cases and to expose the deep and long-standing connections between them. In so doing, this Article uncovers a neglected history of the link between corporations and race, as well as a lost history of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Introduction

“Like Frankenstein’s baby, there was no end to its growing, and no limit to its voracity. And, like that wonderful child, it started in to devour its author.”

– Records of the California Constitutional Convention (1878)

“The Fourteenth Amendment . . . stands in the constitution as a perpetual shield against all unequal and partial legislation by the states, and the injustice which follows from it, whether directed against the most humble or the most powerful; against the despised laborer from China, or the envied master of millions.”

– The Railroad Tax Cases (9th Cir. 1882)

Since the controversial cases of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission¹ 1.558 U.S. 310 (2010).Show More and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby,² 2.573 U.S. 682 (2014).Show More which recognized the political speech and religious freedom rights of corporations,³ 3.In Citizens United, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law, 2 U.S.C. § 441b (2006), that banned direct corporate spending on political campaigns. 558 U.S. at 372. Citizens United was part of a long line of cases in which the Court had recognized the First Amendment rights of corporations, including: NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449, 459 (1958) (freedom of association); NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 428–29 (1963) (freedom of expression and association); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 264 (1964) (freedom of speech and the press); and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, 784 (1978) (campaign expenditures as political speech). Hobby Lobby concluded that corporations were “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb–1, and held that Health and Human Services regulations requiring employers to provide insurance that covered contraceptives unconstitutionally burdened closely held corporations’ exercise of religion. 573 U.S. at 736.Show More respectively, activist groups have been lobbying for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate constitutional personhood.⁴ 4.See Move to Amend, https://www.movetoamend.org/ [https://perma.cc/RH9L-2FZT] (last visited Aug. 19, 2020); United for the People, http://united4thepeople.org/ [https://perma.cc/XS9X-LZNR] (last visited Aug. 19, 2020).Show More Granting corporations constitutional rights, they argue, gives powerful mega-corporations even greater means to avoid regulation and manipulate elections, thus threatening “the democratic promise of America.”⁵ 5.United for the People, supra note 4; Move to Amend, supra note 4. See Joanna M. Meyer, The Real Error in Citizens United, 69 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 2171, 2198 (2012).Show More In 2019, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced a bill to provide that “the rights extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only” and that corporations “shall have no rights under this Constitution.”⁶ 6.H.R.J. Res. 48, 116th Cong. (2019) (proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States providing that the rights extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only). Other bills introduced in both the House and the Senate have targeted specific constitutional rights, such as one “waiving the application of the first article of amendment to the political speech of corporations.” H.R.J. Res. 39, 116th Cong. (2019). See United for the People, http://united4thepeople.org/amendments/ (last visited Oct. 31, 2021) [https://perma.cc/QGU7-883U], for an up-to-date list of proposed amendments relating to corporate constitutional rights.Show More Supporters of this amendment showcase buttons and bumper stickers that proclaim: “Corporations are not People!”⁷ 7.See Move to Amend, https://move-to-amend.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage [https://perma.cc/8JVP-CYAD] (last visited Dec. 28, 2021).Show More

Corporate constitutional rights have been debated since the early years of the American Republic.⁸ 8.For early cases debating the constitutional rights of corporations, see Bank of United States v. Deveaux, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 61, 63–64 (1809); Hope Insurance Co. of Providence v. Boardman, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 57, 58 (1809); Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 43, 46–47 (1815); Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 518, 556 (1819); Proprietors of Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. (11 Peters) 420, 421 (1837); and Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad Co. v. Letson, 43 U.S. (2 Howard) 497, 499 (1844). See also Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, at xxi (2018) (describing how the country’s most powerful corporations have persistently tried to use the Constitution to evade unwanted government regulations); Margaret M. Blair & Elizabeth Pollman, The Derivative Nature of Corporate Constitutional Rights, 56 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1673, 1680 (2015) (explaining how the Supreme Court was tasked with determining the applicability of constitutional provisions to corporations in an 1809 case involving the first Bank of the United States).Show More Missing from histories of corporate personhood, however, is the central role that race played in the development of corporate constitutional rights.⁹ 9.Legal historians of corporate personhood have discussed corporate Fourteenth Amendment cases in some detail but have neglected the role that race played in the development of these cases. For representative writings on corporate personhood and constitutional rights, see Morton J. Horwitz, Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory, 88 W. Va. L. Rev. 173, 174 (1985); Blair & Pollman, supra note 8, at 1677; Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Citizens United and the Corporate Form, 2010 Wis. L. Rev. 999, 1033–34; Gregory A. Mark, The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1441, 1443 (1987); Herbert Hovenkamp, The Classical Corporation in American Legal Thought, 76 Geo. L.J. 1593, 1640–41 (1988); David K. Millon, Theories of the Corporation, 1990 Duke L.J. 201, 205–07; Elizabeth Pollman, Reconceiving Corporate Personhood, 2011 Utah L. Rev. 1629, 1630; Margaret M. Blair, Corporate Personhood and the Corporate Persona, 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. 785, 796–97; Kent Greenfield, In Defense of Corporate Persons, 30 Const. Comment. 309, 310–12 (2015); Tamara R. Piety, Why Personhood Matters, 30 Const. Comment. 361, 362–63 (2015); Turkuler Isiksel, Corporations as Rights-Bearers, J. Pol. (forthcoming) (manuscript at 1–2) (on file with the author).Show More This Article uncovers this link by highlighting the strategy of a group of corporate lawyers and Ninth Circuit¹⁰ 10.At the time, the Circuit Court for the District of California, where the cases discussed in this Article arose, was located in the federal circuit encompassing California and Oregon. This court exercised both original and appellate jurisdiction and was staffed by one Supreme Court Justice (Stephen Field), one circuit court judge (Lorenzo Sawyer), and one district court judge (Ogden Hoffman), any two of which could hear a case. Christian G. Fritz, Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851–1891, at 29–30 (1991). To avoid confusion, this Article follows contemporary scholarship that refers to these cases as occurring in the Ninth Circuit. Id. at 29; Howard J. Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism 573 (1968); Winkler, supra note 8, at 153–54. However, this should not be confused with the modern-day U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which was not created until the federal appellate system was redesigned in 1891. Joshua Glick, On the Road: The Supreme Court and the History of Circuit Riding, 24 Cardozo L. Rev. 1753, 1826 (2003).Show More judges to expand the Fourteenth Amendment using cases involving both corporations and race. As this Article reveals, modern ideas about corporate personhood are predicated on a historical analogy between corporate shareholders and racial minorities.¹¹ 11.A growing area of scholarship explores the connections between corporations and race. See, e.g., Cheryl L. Wade, Attempting to Discuss Race in Business and Corporate Law Courses and Seminars, 77 St. John’s L. Rev. 901 (2003); Alfred Dennis Mathewson, Race in Ordinary Course: Utilizing the Racial Background in Antitrust and Corporate Law Courses, 23 St. John’s J. Legal Comment. 667, 685 (2008); Cheryl L. Wade, Introduction to Symposium on People of Color, Women, and the Public Corporation: The Sophistication of Discrimination, 79 St. John’s L. Rev. 887, 890 (2005); Thomas W. Joo, Corporate Hierarchy and Racial Justice, 79 St. John’s L. Rev. 955 (2005); Thomas W. Joo, Race, Corporate Law, and Shareholder Value, 54 J. Legal Ed. 351 (2004); Juliet E.K. Walker, White Corporate America: The New Arbiter of Race? in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture, 246, 253, 260 (Kenneth Lipartito & David B. Sicilia eds., 2007).Show More Yet racial analogies not only helped corporations gain constitutional rights; corporations themselves created constitutional guarantees that ultimately protected racial minorities. This neglected history shows that corporations have been crucial players in shaping rights guarantees—particularly an expansive interpretation of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment—that apply to individuals as well. In revealing these complex interconnections, this Article exposes the multifaceted legacy of litigation over corporate personhood in the development of modern equal protection jurisprudence.

This Article juxtaposes two seminal cases, decided on the same day in 1886 and brought by the same lawyers: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,¹² 12.118 U.S. 394 (1886).Show More credited with establishing corporate Fourteenth Amendment rights,¹³ 13.See Horwitz, supra note 9, at 173; Blair & Pollman, supra note 8, at 1694–95; Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1033–34.Show More and Yick Wo v. Hopkins,¹⁴ 14.118 U.S. 356 (1886).Show More a touchstone of modern civil rights jurisprudence.¹⁵ 15.See 2 Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties 482, 1055 (Kara E. Stooksbury, John M. Scheb, II & Otis H Stephens, Jr. eds., rev. and expanded ed. 2017); Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision 53 (2004); see also infra notes 327–35 (noting early civil rights cases citing Yick Wo).Show More This Article uncovers the conjoined history of these two Fourteenth Amendment cases, one involving a corporation and the other a Chinese immigrant, and their antecedents.¹⁶ 16.Scholars have studied the connection between Fourteenth Amendment claims of Chinese immigrants and the Supreme Court’s desire to protect economic rights. See Thomas Wuil Joo, New “Conspiracy Theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment: Nineteenth Century Chinese Civil Rights Cases and the Development of Substantive Due Process Jurisprudence, 29 U.S.F. L. Rev. 353, 354–55 (1995); Thomas W. Joo, Yick Wo Re-Revisited: Nonblack Nonwhites and Fourteenth Amendment History, 2008 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1427, 1428; Charles McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America 83 (1994); Graham, supra note 10, at 15; Daniel W. Levy, Classical Lawyers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, 9 W. Legal Hist. 177, 211, 216 (1996); Paul Kens, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age 209 (1997); Winkler, supra note 8, at 153. However, no prior scholarship has specifically examined the intersection of Fourteenth Amendment claims by corporations and by Chinese immigrants.Show More Drawing on little-known archival sources, it traces how the same coterie of corporate lawyers simultaneously brought Fourteenth Amendment cases involving Chinese and corporate litigants before the sympathetic Ninth Circuit in order to strategically craft a broad interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause that applied to all “persons,” natural and artificial alike.¹⁷ 17.See In re Ah Fong, 1 F. Cas. 213, 213 (C.C.D. Cal. 1874) (No. 102); Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 F. Cas. 252, 252 (C.C.D. Cal. 1879) (No. 6,546); In re Ah Chong, 2 F. 733, 737 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880); In re Tiburcio Parrott, 1 F. 481, 482 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880); The Railroad Tax Cases, 13 F. 722, 727 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882); In re Quong Woo, 13 F. 229, 233 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882); County of Santa Clara v. S. Pac. R.R. Co., 18 F. 385, 386, 397 (C.C.D. Cal. 1883), aff’d, 118 U.S. 394 (1886); In re Yick Wo, 9 P. 139, 139 (Cal. 1885), rev’d sub nom. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886); In re Wo Lee, 26 F. 471, 475 (C.C.D. Cal. 1886).Show More Although in the Slaughter-House Cases the Supreme Court had suggested that it would read the Fourteenth Amendment narrowly,¹⁸ 18.Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 80–81 (1873).Show More in Yick Wo and Santa Clara the Court changed course and adopted the Ninth Circuit’s expansive interpretation of equal protection, a doctrinal shift with lasting effects today.

This is not a story of unintended consequences. By expanding the scope of the Equal Protection Clause to include Chinese immigrants, corporate lawyers were able to use the Chinese cases to draw a through-line from African Americans—the original beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment—to Chinese immigrants, to corporate shareholders.¹⁹ 19.The social and political connections of Chinese “coolies” with railroad and mining corporations in the context of Greater Reconstruction debates over the meaning of “free labor” and “equality” are explored in Evelyn Atkinson, Slaves, Coolies, and Shareholders: Corporations Claim the Fourteenth Amendment, 10 J. Civ. War Era 54 (2020).Show More This comparison was made possible because corporate lawyers and federal judges intentionally portrayed the corporation as simply an aggregate of rights-bearing shareholders who did not forsake their constitutional rights when they joined the corporation. In this framing, shareholders were members of a persecuted group, the same as racial minorities.

This view of the corporation as solely an aggregate of rights-bearing shareholders was at odds with an older common law vision of the corporation as both an aggregate of individuals and a separate legal person with special rights and duties distinct from those of “natural” persons.²⁰ 20.See John Dewey, The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality, 35 Yale L.J. 655, 656 (1926); 3 The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland 307 (H. A. L. Fisher ed., 1911).Show More In Part I below, this Article exposes a contour of common law corporate personhood that has not previously been noted: incorporation was a status in which corporate legal persons existed in a hierarchical relationship with the public, akin to master-servant or parent-child.²¹ 21.See discussion infra Part I.Show More The common law view of the corporation as a “child” or “servant” of the public justified more stringent state regulation of corporations than of individuals: the state was the benevolent parent, overseeing its corporate child to ensure the corporation acted in the public interest.²² 22.William Novak discusses the extensive power of state legislatures to regulate in the “public interest” in William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America 19–20 (1996).Show More

Yet as Part II discusses, throughout the nineteenth century, corporate lawyers challenged this view, arguing that corporations were not “children” who owed a special duty of obedience to the parental state but private, profit-making entities whose interests were unrelated or even potentially opposed to those of the public. In this view, the corporation was a naturally arising market phenomenon, akin to any other private market actor, with no special obligation to the public welfare.²³ 23.This has been called the “natural” or “real entity” theory of the corporation, that corporations are naturally emerging market entities controlled by their managers. See Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1000–01; Blair, supra note 9, at 805; Pollman, supra note 9, at 1642; Arthur W. Machen, Jr., Corporate Personality, 24 Harv. L. Rev 253, 262 (1911).Show More In support of this argument, corporate lawyers reframed the corporation not as a group of individuals authorized to act as one “artificial,” “legal person” for certain purposes, but as solely an aggregation of constitutional-rights-bearing shareholders.²⁴ 24.This is called the “aggregate” or “associational” theory. See Horwitz, supra note 9, at 182; Mark, supra note 9, at 1462; Hovenkamp, supra note 9, at 1597–98; Pollman, supra note 9, at 1662. Morton Horwitz argues that the aggregate theory was short-lived because of the increasing separation of management and control and that the “entity” theory replaced the aggregate theory in the early twentieth century. Horwitz, supra note 9, at 182. However, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, and other recent cases have invoked an aggregate view of the corporation to justify extending freedom of speech and religion to corporations. See Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 356 (2010) (“Yet certain disfavored associations of citizens—those that have taken on the corporate form—are penalized for engaging in the same political speech.”); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682, 720 (2014) (attributing the religious beliefs of the shareholders of a closely held corporation to the corporate entity itself). But see Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1040 (arguing that “both the majority and the dissent [of Citizens United] adopted the real entity view of the corporation”). Actually, the Court tacked back and forth between different conceptions of corporate personality.Show More By framing the corporation simply as a collection of private, rights-bearing individuals, corporate lawyers were able to argue that the rights and duties of corporations were simply the rights and duties of the natural persons who composed them, and no more.²⁵ 25.See infra Part I.Show More

This debate over whether the corporation was a state creation granted legal personhood in certain contexts for the purpose of furthering the public interest, or simply a group of private, rights-bearing individuals pursuing their own economic gain, was central to the cases involving corporate Fourteenth Amendment rights. While Morton Horwitz, Gregory Mark, and others have shown that key to the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning in Santa Clara was a view of the corporation as an aggregate of shareholders,²⁶ 26.Horwitz, supra note 9, at 223; Mark, supra note 9, at 1464.Show More they have not examined the equally viable, alternative vision of the corporation as a “child of the state” presented by opposing counsel and reflected in public opinion. More importantly, they have overlooked the racial analogy underlying the precedents to Santa Clara on which the doctrine of corporate constitutional personhood was built.²⁷ 27.Mark and Horwitz have explained the reliance on the aggregate theory of corporate personhood as primarily rooted in property protection. Mark, supra note 9, at 1464; Horwitz, supra note 9, at 177.Show More This Article reveals the background and reasoning behind this significant judicial reframing of corporate personhood: the aggregate theory of the corporation allowed corporate lawyers and judges to analogize shareholders to racial minorities as similarly persecuted groups targeted by discriminatory legislation.

This analogy, of course, disregarded the immense power discrepancy between corporate shareholders and persecuted racial groups. By holding that the Equal Protection Clause applied to “the despised laborer from China” as much as the “envied master of millions,”²⁸ 28.The Railroad Tax Cases, 13 F. 722, 741 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882).Show More the Ninth Circuit endorsed an interpretation of the Amendment as treating all persons alike, regardless of their social and economic power. This reasoning bolstered a “formal equality” interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, in contrast to claims that the Amendment embodied a commitment to “substantive equality” or anti-subordination—part of a trend towards limiting the Amendment’s ability to address long-standing inequalities that continues today.²⁹ 29.“Substantive equality,” or “anti-subordination,” consists not only in eliminating discrimination but also in “alter[ing] the circumstances that are identified as giving rise to equality questions in the first place.” Catharine A. MacKinnon, Substantive Equality: A Perspective, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 1, 11 (2011) [hereinafter MacKinnon, Substantive Equality]; see also Ruth Colker, Reflections on Race: The Limits of Formal Equality, 69 Ohio St. L.J. 1089, 1090 (2008) (contrasting a “formal equality” with an “anti-subordination” perspective); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331, 1336 (1988) (contrasting “equality as a process” with “equality as a result”). For an extensive analysis of “formal” versus “substantive” concepts of equality, see generally Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sex Equality (2007) [hereinafter MacKinnon, Sex Equality].Show More

This is not a case of manipulation by corporate lawyers of disempowered minority litigants. Chinese litigants were willing partners in the strategy to join forces with corporations to expand the Fourteenth Amendment. As this Article reveals, the economic and social connections between industrial corporate magnates and the elite Chinese mercantile and political community were long-standing. Both relied financially on the continued immigration of Chinese laborers, and both had long been represented by the same corporate lawyers. They were also both the target of discriminatory regulations that aimed to simultaneously curb corporate power and stem Chinese immigration. The Fourteenth Amendment provided a valuable tool for corporate lawyers to advocate on behalf of both sets of clients. By eliding the difference between Chinese immigrants and shareholders in these interrelated lines of cases, corporate lawyers cemented an interpretation of equal protection that culminated in the success of the twin cases of Santa Clara and Yick Wo.

For years, scholars have pondered Chief Justice Morrison Waite’s famously blithe comment at the outset of oral argument in Santa Clara that the Justices did not wish to hear argument on whether the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations, as they were “all of [the] opinion that it does.”³⁰ 30.Santa Clara County v. S. Pac. R.R. Co., 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886); see, e.g., Howard Jay Graham, The Waite Court and the Fourteenth Amendment, 17 Vand. L. Rev. 525, 530 (1964) (“Nowhere in the United States Reports are there to be found words more momentous or more baffling than these.”); Horwitz, supra note 9, at 173 (“[The decision] has always been puzzling and controversial”); Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644 n.92 (“[T]he unusual circumstances of this case have evoked skepticism and debate.”).Show More Gregory Mark has pointed out that Waite expressly avoided addressing the constitutional question and argued that his statement indicated that the Court merely intended to accept the argument that the corporate property in this case was protected as property of the shareholders.³¹ 31.Mark, supra note 9, at 1464.Show More Elizabeth Pollman has also explained Waite’s statement as concerned with protecting the shareholders’ property interests.³² 32.Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644–45.Show More Howard Graham, dismissing the claim as “dictum,” went so far as to contend that “the recording of this statement was a fluke––the Court reporter’s after-thought!”³³ 33.Graham, supra note 30, at 530.Show More Adam Winkler has likewise claimed that Waite never intended his quote to become part of the opinion, but that it was intentionally misrepresented in the case report by a perfidious court reporter.³⁴ 34.Winkler, supra note 8, at 153.Show More

J. Willard Hurst even posited that, given late nineteenth-century law’s general embrace of economic activity, extending the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations “provoked no significant contemporary controversy.”³⁵ 35.James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States 1780–1970, at 68 (1970).Show More

This Article offers a novel interpretation of this puzzle. By reading Santa Clara in light of Yick Wo and the preceding line of corporate and Chinese Fourteenth Amendment cases, this Article illuminates the context of equal protection jurisprudence surrounding Waite’s enigmatic statement—specifically, the interplay between corporate personhood and race. As this Article reveals, the definition of equal protection that the Court adopted in Yick Wo had been developed in Ninth Circuit corporate and Chinese Fourteenth Amendment cases throughout the preceding decade and was central to the arguments of counsel in both Yick Wo and Santa Clara. By the time the Waite Court heard Santa Clara, the link between racial minorities and corporate shareholders had become well established in equal protection jurisprudence.³⁶ 36.Elizabeth Pollman notes the precedential effect of the Ninth Circuit’s equal protection jurisprudence but does not explore the explicit connections to race. Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644.Show More Although the Court announced its expanded interpretation of equal protection in Yick Wo rather than Santa Clara, its reasoning had long been applied equally to corporate litigants. This Article suggests that one reason why the Court declined to hear arguments on whether the Fourteenth Amendment protected corporations was because the combined precedent of Chinese and corporate cases had already established that it did.

The success of corporations at claiming constitutional rights has produced a forked legacy. Critics of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby have contended that corporate personhood has been used to trump the rights of individuals³⁷ 37.As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in Hobby Lobby, the majority prioritized religious rights of employers over the reproductive rights of female employees. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682, 740 (2014) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); see also Jessica L. Waters & Leandra N. Carrasco, Untangling the Reproductive Rights and Religious Liberty Knot, 26 Yale J.L. & Feminism 217 (2014).Show More and to subvert the democratic process.³⁸ 38.One outcome of Citizens United has arguably been to permit dark-money groups to sway elections. See Heather K. Gerken, The Real Problem with Citizens United: Campaign Finance, Dark Money, and Shadow Parties, 97 Marq. L. Rev. 903, 905 (2014); Danny Emmer, Shedding Light on “Dark Money”: The Heightened Risk of Foreign Influence Post-Citizens United, 20 Sw. J. Int’l L. 381, 382 (2014).Show More In contrast, supporters of the decisions have argued that corporations are collections of shareholders who do not lose their fundamental rights simply because they do business as a corporation.³⁹ 39.Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339–40 (2010); Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. at 706–07; see, e.g., Richard A. Epstein, The Defeat of the Contraceptive Mandate in Hobby Lobby: Right Results, Wrong Reasons, 2014 Cato Sup. Ct. Rev. 35, 45; Paul Horwitz, The Hobby Lobby Moment, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 154, 162–63 (2014).Show More Yet even those who oppose corporate constitutional personhood must acknowledge the discomfiting reality that corporate rights litigation has been, and continues to be, an important means of expanding rights protections for natural persons. Today, corporations play an important role in protecting civil rights in other contexts, such as by bringing claims for racial discrimination on behalf of their members under the 1866 Civil Rights Act.⁴⁰ 40.42 U.S.C. § 1981(a). Because corporations are typically the contracting party in these cases, not the natural persons against which the actual discrimination is directed, under common law principles of contract law the corporation is the only “person” that has standing to sue. See infra note 342.Corporate litigation has also laid the groundwork for individual claims regarding religious freedom. Hobby Lobby has been invoked by smaller corporations, nonprofits, individuals, and partnerships claiming freedom of religion rights in similar contexts. See, e.g., Brief for Petitioners at 38 n.6, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colo. C.R. Comm’n, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018) (No. 16-111); Reply Brief for Petitioners in Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453 & 14-1505, at 7–8, Zubik v. Burwell, 578 U.S. 403 (2016) (Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453, 14-1505, 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191); Brief for Petitioners in Nos. 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191, at 2, Zubik, 578 U.S. 403 (Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453, 14-1505, 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191). The wealth and institutional knowledge of large corporations like Hobby Lobby and their lawyers make them ideally suited to pursue impact litigation that establishes precedent for non-corporate claims of religious freedom violations.Show More This does not mean we should rehabilitate constitutional-rights-bearing corporate persons; but we must admit that a blanket condemnation of corporate personhood ignores the important historical legacy of corporate rights litigation and the continued interconnection—even interdependency—of corporations and racial minorities.

The Article proceeds in three Parts. Part I addresses the common law vision of the corporation as both an aggregate of individuals and a “child of the state” with rights and duties different from those of natural persons and traces the continued viability of this vision throughout the period in which Santa Clara was decided. Part II concerns corporate challenges to this traditional view in Fourteenth Amendment litigation, examining the strategy of corporate lawyers’ and Ninth Circuit judges’ reliance on the aggregate theory of corporate personhood to analogize Chinese immigrants to corporate shareholders in order to support a broad reading of the Equal Protection Clause. Part III examines the background of Santa Clara and reveals how the meaning of equal protection established by the Chinese and corporate Fourteenth Amendment cases informed the Court’s ultimate rulings in Santa Clara and Yick Wo, laying the groundwork for modern equal protection doctrine today.

1. * Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago. Ph.D, University of Chicago; J.D., Harvard Law School. Many thanks to Amy Dru Stanley, Laura Weinrib, Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Levy, Ajay Mehrotra, Christopher Schmidt, Naomi Lamoreaux, Gregory Mark, Adam Winkler, Paul Kens, Nikolas Bowie, Naama Maor, Lael Weinberger, and the American Bar Foundation Doctoral Fellows Workshop (2018–2020) for their comments and insights. Thank you also to the editors of the Virginia Law Review for their deep engagement with this text, as well as their technical prowess. ↑
2. 558 U.S. 310 (2010). ↑
3. 573 U.S. 682 (2014). ↑
4. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law, 2 U.S.C. § 441b (2006), that banned direct corporate spending on political campaigns. 558 U.S. at 372. Citizens United was part of a long line of cases in which the Court had recognized the First Amendment rights of corporations, including: NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449, 459 (1958) (freedom of association); NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 428–29 (1963) (freedom of expression and association); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 264 (1964) (freedom of speech and the press); and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, 784 (1978) (campaign expenditures as political speech). Hobby Lobby concluded that corporations were “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb–1, and held that Health and Human Services regulations requiring employers to provide insurance that covered contraceptives unconstitutionally burdened closely held corporations’ exercise of religion. 573 U.S. at 736. ↑
5. See Move to Amend, https://www.movetoamend.org/ [https://perma.cc/RH9L-2FZT] (last visited Aug. 19, 2020); United for the People, http://united4thepeople.org/ [https://perma.cc/XS9X-LZNR] (last visited Aug. 19, 2020). ↑
6. United for the People, supra note 4; Move to Amend, supra note 4. See Joanna M. Meyer, The Real Error in Citizens United, 69 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 2171, 2198 (2012). ↑
7. H.R.J. Res. 48, 116th Cong. (2019) (proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States providing that the rights extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only). Other bills introduced in both the House and the Senate have targeted specific constitutional rights, such as one “waiving the application of the first article of amendment to the political speech of corporations.” H.R.J. Res. 39, 116th Cong. (2019). See United for the People, http://united4thepeople.org/amendments/ (last visited Oct. 31, 2021) [https://perma.cc/QGU7-883U], for an up-to-date list of proposed amendments relating to corporate constitutional rights. ↑
8.  See Move to Amend, https://move-to-amend.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage [https://perma.cc/8JVP-CYAD] (last visited Dec. 28, 2021). ↑
9. For early cases debating the constitutional rights of corporations, see Bank of United States v. Deveaux, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 61, 63–64 (1809); Hope Insurance Co. of Providence v. Boardman, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 57, 58 (1809); Terrett v. Taylor, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 43, 46–47 (1815); Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 518, 556 (1819); Proprietors of Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. (11 Peters) 420, 421 (1837); and Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad Co. v. Letson, 43 U.S. (2 Howard) 497, 499 (1844). See also Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, at xxi (2018) (describing how the country’s most powerful corporations have persistently tried to use the Constitution to evade unwanted government regulations); Margaret M. Blair & Elizabeth Pollman, The Derivative Nature of Corporate Constitutional Rights, 56 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1673, 1680 (2015) (explaining how the Supreme Court was tasked with determining the applicability of constitutional provisions to corporations in an 1809 case involving the first Bank of the United States). ↑
10.  Legal historians of corporate personhood have discussed corporate Fourteenth Amendment cases in some detail but have neglected the role that race played in the development of these cases. For representative writings on corporate personhood and constitutional rights, see Morton J. Horwitz, Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory, 88 W. Va. L. Rev. 173, 174 (1985); Blair & Pollman, supra note 8, at 1677; Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Citizens United and the Corporate Form, 2010 Wis. L. Rev. 999, 1033–34; Gregory A. Mark, The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1441, 1443 (1987); Herbert Hovenkamp, The Classical Corporation in American Legal Thought, 76 Geo. L.J. 1593, 1640–41 (1988); David K. Millon, Theories of the Corporation, 1990 Duke L.J. 201, 205–07; Elizabeth Pollman, Reconceiving Corporate Personhood, 2011 Utah L. Rev. 1629, 1630; Margaret M. Blair, Corporate Personhood and the Corporate Persona, 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. 785, 796–97; Kent Greenfield, In Defense of Corporate Persons, 30 Const. Comment. 309, 310–12 (2015); Tamara R. Piety, Why Personhood Matters, 30 Const. Comment. 361, 362–63 (2015); Turkuler Isiksel, Corporations as Rights-Bearers, J. Pol. (forthcoming) (manuscript at 1–2) (on file with the author). ↑
11. At the time, the Circuit Court for the District of California, where the cases discussed in this Article arose, was located in the federal circuit encompassing California and Oregon. This court exercised both original and appellate jurisdiction and was staffed by one Supreme Court Justice (Stephen Field), one circuit court judge (Lorenzo Sawyer), and one district court judge (Ogden Hoffman), any two of which could hear a case. Christian G. Fritz, Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851–1891, at 29–30 (1991). To avoid confusion, this Article follows contemporary scholarship that refers to these cases as occurring in the Ninth Circuit. Id. at 29; Howard J. Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism 573 (1968); Winkler, supra note 8, at 153–54. However, this should not be confused with the modern-day U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which was not created until the federal appellate system was redesigned in 1891. Joshua Glick, On the Road: The Supreme Court and the History of Circuit Riding, 24 Cardozo L. Rev. 1753, 1826 (2003). ↑
12. A growing area of scholarship explores the connections between corporations and race. See, e.g., Cheryl L. Wade, Attempting to Discuss Race in Business and Corporate Law Courses and Seminars, 77 St. John’s L. Rev. 901 (2003); Alfred Dennis Mathewson, Race in Ordinary Course: Utilizing the Racial Background in Antitrust and Corporate Law Courses, 23 St. John’s J. Legal Comment. 667, 685 (2008); Cheryl L. Wade, Introduction to Symposium on People of Color, Women, and the Public Corporation: The Sophistication of Discrimination, 79 St. John’s L. Rev. 887, 890 (2005); Thomas W. Joo, Corporate Hierarchy and Racial Justice, 79 St. John’s L. Rev. 955 (2005); Thomas W. Joo, Race, Corporate Law, and Shareholder Value, 54 J. Legal Ed. 351 (2004); Juliet E.K. Walker, White Corporate America: The New Arbiter of Race? in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture, 246, 253, 260 (Kenneth Lipartito & David B. Sicilia eds., 2007). ↑
13. 118 U.S. 394 (1886). ↑
14. See Horwitz, supra note 9, at 173; Blair & Pollman, supra note 8, at 1694–95; Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1033–34. ↑
15. 118 U.S. 356 (1886). ↑
16.  See 2 Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties 482, 1055 (Kara E. Stooksbury, John M. Scheb, II & Otis H Stephens, Jr. eds., rev. and expanded ed. 2017); Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision 53 (2004); see also infra notes 327–35 (noting early civil rights cases citing Yick Wo). ↑
17. Scholars have studied the connection between Fourteenth Amendment claims of Chinese immigrants and the Supreme Court’s desire to protect economic rights. See Thomas Wuil Joo, New “Conspiracy Theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment: Nineteenth Century Chinese Civil Rights Cases and the Development of Substantive Due Process Jurisprudence, 29 U.S.F. L. Rev. 353, 354–55 (1995); Thomas W. Joo, Yick Wo Re-Revisited: Nonblack Nonwhites and Fourteenth Amendment History, 2008 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1427, 1428; Charles McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America 83 (1994); Graham, supra note 10, at 15; Daniel W. Levy, Classical Lawyers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, 9 W. Legal Hist. 177, 211, 216 (1996); Paul Kens, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age 209 (1997); Winkler, supra note 8, at 153. However, no prior scholarship has specifically examined the intersection of Fourteenth Amendment claims by corporations and by Chinese immigrants. ↑
18. See In re Ah Fong, 1 F. Cas. 213, 213 (C.C.D. Cal. 1874) (No. 102); Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 F. Cas. 252, 252 (C.C.D. Cal. 1879) (No. 6,546); In re Ah Chong, 2 F. 733, 737 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880); In re Tiburcio Parrott, 1 F. 481, 482 (C.C.D. Cal. 1880); The Railroad Tax Cases, 13 F. 722, 727 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882); In re Quong Woo, 13 F. 229, 233 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882); County of Santa Clara v. S. Pac. R.R. Co., 18 F. 385, 386, 397 (C.C.D. Cal. 1883), aff’d, 118 U.S. 394 (1886); In re Yick Wo, 9 P. 139, 139 (Cal. 1885), rev’d sub nom. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886); In re Wo Lee, 26 F. 471, 475 (C.C.D. Cal. 1886). ↑
19. Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 80–81 (1873). ↑
20. The social and political connections of Chinese “coolies” with railroad and mining corporations in the context of Greater Reconstruction debates over the meaning of “free labor” and “equality” are explored in Evelyn Atkinson, Slaves, Coolies, and Shareholders: Corporations Claim the Fourteenth Amendment, 10 J. Civ. War Era 54 (2020). ↑
21. See John Dewey, The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality, 35 Yale L.J. 655, 656 (1926); 3 The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland 307 (H. A. L. Fisher ed., 1911). ↑
22. See discussion infra Part I. ↑
23. William Novak discusses the extensive power of state legislatures to regulate in the “public interest” in William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America 19–20 (1996). ↑
24. This has been called the “natural” or “real entity” theory of the corporation, that corporations are naturally emerging market entities controlled by their managers. See Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1000–01; Blair, supra note 9, at 805; Pollman, supra note 9, at 1642; Arthur W. Machen, Jr., Corporate Personality, 24 Harv. L. Rev 253, 262 (1911). ↑
25. This is called the “aggregate” or “associational” theory. See Horwitz, supra note 9, at 182; Mark, supra note 9, at 1462; Hovenkamp, supra note 9, at 1597–98; Pollman, supra note 9, at 1662. Morton Horwitz argues that the aggregate theory was short-lived because of the increasing separation of management and control and that the “entity” theory replaced the aggregate theory in the early twentieth century. Horwitz, supra note 9, at 182. However, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, and other recent cases have invoked an aggregate view of the corporation to justify extending freedom of speech and religion to corporations. See Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 356 (2010) (“Yet certain disfavored associations of citizens—those that have taken on the corporate form—are penalized for engaging in the same political speech.”); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682, 720 (2014) (attributing the religious beliefs of the shareholders of a closely held corporation to the corporate entity itself). But see Avi-Yonah, supra note 9, at 1040 (arguing that “both the majority and the dissent [of Citizens United] adopted the real entity view of the corporation”). Actually, the Court tacked back and forth between different conceptions of corporate personality. ↑
26. See infra Part I. ↑
27. Horwitz, supra note 9, at 223; Mark, supra note 9, at 1464. ↑
28. Mark and Horwitz have explained the reliance on the aggregate theory of corporate personhood as primarily rooted in property protection. Mark, supra note 9, at 1464; Horwitz, supra note 9, at 177. ↑
29. The Railroad Tax Cases, 13 F. 722, 741 (C.C.D. Cal. 1882). ↑
30.  “Substantive equality,” or “anti-subordination,” consists not only in eliminating discrimination but also in “alter[ing] the circumstances that are identified as giving rise to equality questions in the first place.” Catharine A. MacKinnon, Substantive Equality: A Perspective, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 1, 11 (2011) [hereinafter MacKinnon, Substantive Equality]; see also Ruth Colker, Reflections on Race: The Limits of Formal Equality, 69 Ohio St. L.J. 1089, 1090 (2008) (contrasting a “formal equality” with an “anti-subordination” perspective); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331, 1336 (1988) (contrasting “equality as a process” with “equality as a result”). For an extensive analysis of “formal” versus “substantive” concepts of equality, see generally Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sex Equality (2007) [hereinafter MacKinnon, Sex Equality]. ↑
31. Santa Clara County v. S. Pac. R.R. Co., 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886); see, e.g., Howard Jay Graham, The Waite Court and the Fourteenth Amendment, 17 Vand. L. Rev. 525, 530 (1964) (“Nowhere in the United States Reports are there to be found words more momentous or more baffling than these.”); Horwitz, supra note 9, at 173 (“[The decision] has always been puzzling and controversial”); Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644 n.92 (“[T]he unusual circumstances of this case have evoked skepticism and debate.”). ↑
32. Mark, supra note 9, at 1464. ↑
33. Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644–45. ↑
34. Graham, supra note 30, at 530. ↑
35. Winkler, supra note 8, at 153. ↑
36. James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States 1780–1970, at 68 (1970). ↑
37. Elizabeth Pollman notes the precedential effect of the Ninth Circuit’s equal protection jurisprudence but does not explore the explicit connections to race. Pollman, supra note 9, at 1644. ↑
38. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in Hobby Lobby, the majority prioritized religious rights of employers over the reproductive rights of female employees. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682, 740 (2014) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); see also Jessica L. Waters & Leandra N. Carrasco, Untangling the Reproductive Rights and Religious Liberty Knot, 26 Yale J.L. & Feminism 217 (2014). ↑
39. One outcome of Citizens United has arguably been to permit dark-money groups to sway elections. See Heather K. Gerken, The Real Problem with Citizens United: Campaign Finance, Dark Money, and Shadow Parties, 97 Marq. L. Rev. 903, 905 (2014); Danny Emmer, Shedding Light on “Dark Money”: The Heightened Risk of Foreign Influence Post-Citizens United, 20 Sw. J. Int’l L. 381, 382 (2014). ↑
40. Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339–40 (2010); Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. at 706–07; see, e.g., Richard A. Epstein, The Defeat of the Contraceptive Mandate in Hobby Lobby: Right Results, Wrong Reasons, 2014 Cato Sup. Ct. Rev. 35, 45; Paul Horwitz, The Hobby Lobby Moment, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 154, 162–63 (2014). ↑

41. 42 U.S.C. § 1981(a). Because corporations are typically the contracting party in these cases, not the natural persons against which the actual discrimination is directed, under common law principles of contract law the corporation is the only “person” that has standing to sue. See infra note 342.

    Corporate litigation has also laid the groundwork for individual claims regarding religious freedom. Hobby Lobby has been invoked by smaller corporations, nonprofits, individuals, and partnerships claiming freedom of religion rights in similar contexts. See, e.g., Brief for Petitioners at 38 n.6, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colo. C.R. Comm’n, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018) (No. 16-111); Reply Brief for Petitioners in Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453 & 14-1505, at 7–8, Zubik v. Burwell, 578 U.S. 403 (2016) (Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453, 14-1505, 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191); Brief for Petitioners in Nos. 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191, at 2, Zubik, 578 U.S. 403 (Nos. 14-1418, 14-1453, 14-1505, 15-35, 15-105, 15-119 & 15-191). The wealth and institutional knowledge of large corporations like Hobby Lobby and their lawyers make them ideally suited to pursue impact litigation that establishes precedent for non-corporate claims of religious freedom violations. ↑

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Among the scholars that have explored the connection between colonial disallowance and the origins of judicial review, some have documented the link between imperial legislative review of colonial legislation and James Madison’s proposed constitutional solution to the problem of unrestrained state legislatures in the aftermath of independence. What remains to be explored, however, is how Madison explicitly drew on the history of imperial review of colonial Virginia’s laws as he argued at the Constitutional Convention for a federal power to “negative” state laws. Accordingly, this Note’s third contribution is to reveal that the historical practice of imperial review in Madison’s native Virginia animated his proposed solution to check the unrestrained popular will of state legislators. Although his proposed solution was ultimately rejected at the Convention, that rejection was conditioned on the judiciary possessing the power of judicial review. By exposing this hidden link, this Note demonstrates that colonial Virginia rightly may be regarded as the intellectual incubator of judicial review.

Introduction

During the British imperial era, the supreme laws of England trumped conflicting inferior colonial law. Colonial assemblies—by the terms of their colonial charters—were prohibited from enacting legislation repugnant to the laws of England. The British monarch, to both monitor the colonial assemblies and to ensure compliance with the superior laws of England, empowered the Board of Trade (“Board”) and the Privy Council with the duty to enforce the so-called repugnancy principle. That principle required the Privy Council and the Board to compare colonial legislation to English law. If the colonial legislation was, upon that comparison, deemed repugnant to the laws of England, then the law was disallowed.¹ 1.Disallowance was the term used to proclaim that colonial law was legally inoperative as it diverged from the laws of England. See Dudley Odell McGovney, The British Privy Council’s Power to Restrain the Legislatures of Colonial America: Power to Disallow Statutes: Power to Veto, 94 U. Pa. L. Rev. 59, 81 (1946); see also Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery 15 (2006) (equating disallowance to a “veto”); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Rejection of Horizontal Judicial Review During America’s Colonial Period, 2 Critical Analysis L. 214, 218 n.19 (2015) (“[D]isallowance operated as a ‘repeal’ of the statute.”).Show More The historical record suggests that the imperial power of legislative review was not one the Privy Council and the Board were hesitant to exercise. Indeed, from 1696, when the Board of Trade was established, to 1776, when the United States declared its independence, scholars have estimated that more than 8,500 colonial laws were reviewed,² 2.Mary S. Bilder, The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review, 116 Yale L.J. 502, 538 (2006).Show More and over 400 colonial laws were disallowed for being repugnant to the laws of England.³ 3.Jonathan R.T. Hughes, Social Control in the Colonial Economy 13 n.12 (1976); see also Leon T. David, Councillors and the Law Officers in the Colonies in America, 12 Am. U. L. Rev. 23, 32 (1963) (“Of some 8,563 acts submitted for approval, it disallowed 469.”); Sharon Hamby O’Connor & Mary Sarah Bilder, Appeals to the Privy Council Before American Independence:An Annotated Digital Catalogue, 104 Law Libr. J. 83, 85 (2012) (“The Council could disallow a law; approximately 8563 were sent for review and 469 (5.5%) disallowed.”).Show More This historical system of oversight and disallowance echoes a similar, more modern institution: American judicial review. The similarity between British imperial oversight and modern judicial review has not gone unnoticed. In the words of one historian, the Privy Council and the Board subjected colonial “provincial laws to a kind of constitutional test.”⁴ 4.Oliver Morton Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696–1765, at 234 (1912).Show More

Within the last decade, Mary Bilder and Alison LaCroix have explored the connection between the disallowance of colonial legislation and the origin of judicial review.⁵ 5.See Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (2004); Alison L. LaCroix, The Authority for Federalism: Madison’s Negative and the Origins of Federal Ideology, 28 Law & Hist. Rev. 451, 466–69 (2010). But see Philip Hamburger, A Tale of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review and Judicial Duty, 78 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1162, 1174–75 n.38 (2010). His research shows that “judges had for centuries done their duty by holding government acts unlawful and void. They had done this as to sovereign acts of the king and even as to legislation, other than acts of Parliament. As a result, early American judges did not need to establish precedents for a power of judicial review.” Id. Although Professor Hamburger offers a compelling alternative account, he overlooks the fact that even though crown officials “consistently recognized the assemblies’ authority to pass laws, they always insisted that those bodies were subordinate institutions.” Jack P. Greene, Law and Origins of the American Revolution in The Cambridge History of Law in America 447, 449 (Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins eds., 2008). The insubordination of colonial assemblies beneath the British imperial apparatus thus also provides a historical antecedent from which Americans, like James Madison, could derive intellectual inspiration for American judicial review.Show More The argument is that “recurrent administrative testing of colonial statutes against a ‘constitutional’ standard exemplified in the laws of England helped pave the way for acceptance of the doctrine of judicial review in the new nation.”⁶ 6.Joseph H. Smith, Administrative Control of the Courts of the American Plantations, 61 Colum. L. Rev. 1210, 1253 (1961).Show More Yet the extant historical scholarship devoted to this striking similarity hardly touches upon the mechanics of imperial disallowance.⁷ 7.Astonishingly, Oliver Morton Dickerson’s American Colonial Government, which was published in 1912, remains the authoritative source on the mechanics of imperial disallowance.Show More In this respect, this Note’s first contribution is to explain the mechanics by which the repugnancy principle was enforced against inferior colonial law.

By a similar token, even fewer scholars have attempted to connect colonial legislation and the law’s surrounding historical context to the Board and the Privy Council’s ultimate repugnancy assessment.⁸ 8.See Mary Sarah Bilder, Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law, in Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz 28, 43 (Daniel W. Hamilton & Alfred L. Brophy eds., 2009).Show More The reason for the dearth of scholarly literature linking together these narratives is that there exists “no comprehensive list of disallowed acts.”⁹ 9.Id.Show More This lacuna in source material also explains why “comparably little study has been given to the topic” of imperial review of colonial law in general.¹⁰ 10.Id.Show More In response, this Note’s second contribution is to augment the existing literature by exploring the colonial experience under imperial supervision, specifically in the Colony of Virginia.

Colonial Virginia, after all, “had the largest population of any colony in North America,” possessed an influential economic and legal system, and “produced great leaders,” many of whom would go onto shape the Constitution’s structural framework.¹¹ 11.William E. Nelson, The Law of Colonial Maryland: Virginia Without Its Grandeur, 54 Am. J. Legal Hist. 168, 198–99 (2014).Show More Virginia was, on balance, “the jewel in the crown” of Britain’s overseas empire.¹² 12.Mary Carroll Johansen, The Relationship Between the Board of Trade and Plantations and the Colonial Government of Virginia, 1696–1775, at 38 (1992) (unpublished M.A. thesis, The College of William & Mary) (on file with The College of William & Mary Libraries).Show More This fact alone makes the absence of a thorough analysis of colonial Virginia’s interaction with the Privy Council remarkable. And this historical gap is only compounded by the fact that the “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, was himself a son of colonial Virginia.¹³ 13.Michael P. Zuckert, Judicial Review and the Incomplete Constitution: A Madisonian Perspective on the Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism, in The Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism 53, 55 (Steven Kautz et al. eds., 2009).Show More In modern times, Madison is rightly memorialized for his profound influence on the Federal Constitution’s structure and for “laying the foundations of the Republic.”¹⁴ 14.Charles Evans Hughes, James Madison, 18 A.B.A. J. 854, 854 (1932) (referring to Madison as the “Father of the Constitution”); see also Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Being Seen Like a State: How Americans (and Britons) Built the Constitutional Infrastructure of a Developing Nation, 59 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1239, 1269 (2018) (“His theory of factional checks and balances is why many consider him the most thoughtful constitution maker.”).Show More He understood the “overall logic of the new order better than anyone else at the time.”¹⁵ 15.Zuckert, supra note 13, at 55.Show More His understanding of the new order was, as it turns out, deeply shaped by his experience with the old. According to Alison LaCroix, the “centerpiece of Madison’s plan to reconstitute the Republic . . . sprang directly from the institutions and practices of the British Empire, the thralldom of which the American colonies had escaped.”¹⁶ 16.LaCroix, supra note 5, at 464.Show More Likewise, Michael Zuckert contends that Madison had both “an unparalleled understanding of the political nature of the Constitution,” and possessed “an unexcelled understanding of what judicial review was to be in the new system.”¹⁷ 17.Zuckert, supra note 13, at 55.Show More Yet underappreciated, until now, is the influence that Privy Council disallowance of his own commonwealth’s legislation had on Madison’s frame of mind and his approach to subordinating the will of state and national electorates to the supreme law of the land.

Herein lies this Note’s third contribution. In short, I seek to enrich the existing scholarship on the origins of judicial review by offering a targeted analysis of the experience in colonial Virginia. Many scholars have argued that the concept of judicial review originated from Madison’s proposals at the Constitutional Convention.¹⁸ 18.See Steven G. Calabresi, Originalism and James Bradley Thayer, 113 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1419, 1450–51 (2019) (building on James Bradley Thayer’s discussion of Madison’s proposed continuation of the imperial practice of legislative review); see also Sean Gailmard, Imperial Politics, English Law, and the Strategic Foundations of Constitutional Review in America, 113 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 778, 788 (2019) (“My argument is that delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 recognized and sought to preserve benefits of Crown review by the Privy Council as an external bound on legislation.”).Show More The general story tracing the link between the Privy Council, the Constitutional Convention, and the federal courts’ ability to disallow repugnant legislation has been told.¹⁹ 19.Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 granted federal courts jurisdiction over state courts in matters where “the validity of a statute” is drawn into question “on the ground of their being repugnant to the constitution.” Judiciary Act of Sept. 24, 1789, ch. 20, § 25, 1 Stat. 73, 85. In essence, the federal courts were empowered, much like the Board and the Privy Council, with the duty to enforce the repugnancy principle against state and federal legislation that conflicted, not with the laws of England, but with the text of the Constitution.Show More Against the backdrop of these abstract accounts, this Note restricts the study of Privy Council oversight specifically to colonial Virginia. This narrow focus better facilitates an understanding of how Madison, through his knowledge of actual practice, envisioned the will of subordinate legislatures conforming to the supremacy of the new Federal Constitution.²⁰ 20.Indeed, Professor Jordan Cash has observed that “judicial review had long been practiced in Virginia, and the English jurisdictional tradition continued to be influential into the early national period.” Jordan T. Cash, The Court and the Old Dominion: Judicial Review Among the Virginia Jeffersonians, 35 Law & Hist. Rev. 351, 365 (2017). Although less general than most accounts, Professor Cash’s assertion still paints with too broad a brush, as it does not explore British imperial oversight’s influence upon Madison’s proposed constitutional solutions.Show More As this Note uncovers, Madison himself thought deeply about imperial review of colonial legislation—particularly that of colonial Virginia—in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention. And it was from Madison’s Privy Council-influenced proposals that judicial review ultimately sprung. This Note, therefore, confines itself to the study of Privy Council oversight of colonial Virginia and explores the story of three Virginian colonial acts, and their interaction with the British imperial system, to cast useful light on Madison’s vision of judicial review and constitutional theory more generally.

This Note is divided into three Parts. Part I discusses the history of the Board of Trade and the Privy Council’s enforcement of the repugnancy principle. Surprisingly, that enforcement process, and the innerworkings of both the Privy Council and the Board, has received remarkably little scholarly attention. Part II details the three Virginian Acts in chronological order. Discussing each Act’s historical context and ultimate demise brings to the surface some of the major issues that plagued colonial society. It also calls attention to the process and general cultural perception of legislative review in colonial Virginia. Part III turns to the influence imperial oversight of Virginia’s colonial legislation had on Madison—an influence that inspired Madison’s proposed federal constitutional framework. In short, the influence that both the Privy Council and Board’s scrutiny of Virginia’s colonial legislation had on Madison’s attempt to restrain the democratic will of state and national electorates may help us more clearly understand the imperial, colonial origin of judicial review.

1. * University of Virginia School of Law, J.D. 2020. I am grateful first and foremost for Professor Cynthia Nicoletti and her insightful input, unwavering patience, and immense generosity. I would like to thank both Christian Talley and Anna Cecile Pepper for helpful comments and also the members of the Virginia Law Review, especially Clay Phillips, for careful editing and feedback. I am solely responsible for all errors. ↑
2. Disallowance was the term used to proclaim that colonial law was legally inoperative as it diverged from the laws of England. See Dudley Odell McGovney, The British Privy Council’s Power to Restrain the Legislatures of Colonial America: Power to Disallow Statutes: Power to Veto, 94 U. Pa. L. Rev
   

   .

   59, 81 (1946); see also Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery 15 (2006) (equating disallowance to a “veto”); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Rejection of Horizontal Judicial Review During America’s Colonial Period, 2 Critical Analysis L. 214, 218 n.19 (2015) (“[D]isallowance operated as a ‘repeal’ of the statute.”). ↑

3. Mary S. Bilder, The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review, 116 Yale L.J
   

   .

   502, 538 (2006). ↑

4. Jonathan R.T. Hughes, Social Control in the Colonial Economy 13 n.12 (1976); see also Leon T. David, Councillors and the Law Officers in the Colonies in America, 12 Am. U. L. Rev
   

   .

   23, 32 (1963) (“Of some 8,563 acts submitted for approval, it disallowed 469.”); Sharon Hamby O’Connor & Mary Sarah Bilder, Appeals to the Privy Council Before American Independence: An Annotated Digital Catalogue, 104 Law Libr. J

   .

   83, 85 (2012) (“The Council could disallow a law; approximately 8563 were sent for review and 469 (5.5%) disallowed.”). ↑

5. Oliver Morton Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696–1765, at 234 (1912). ↑
6. See Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (2004); Alison L. LaCroix, The Authority for Federalism: Madison’s Negative and the Origins of Federal Ideology, 28 Law & Hist. Rev. 451, 466–69 (2010). But see Philip Hamburger, A Tale of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review and Judicial Duty, 78 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1162, 1174–75 n.38 (2010). His research shows that “judges had for centuries done their duty by holding government acts unlawful and void. They had done this as to sovereign acts of the king and even as to legislation, other than acts of Parliament. As a result, early American judges did not need to establish precedents for a power of judicial review.” Id. Although Professor Hamburger offers a compelling alternative account, he overlooks the fact that even though crown officials “consistently recognized the assemblies’ authority to pass laws, they always insisted that those bodies were subordinate institutions.” Jack P. Greene, Law and Origins of the American Revolution in The Cambridge History of Law in America 447, 449 (Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins eds., 2008). The insubordination of colonial assemblies beneath the British imperial apparatus thus also provides a historical antecedent from which Americans, like James Madison, could derive intellectual inspiration for American judicial review. ↑
7. Joseph H. Smith, Administrative Control of the Courts of the American Plantations, 61 Colum. L. Rev. 1210, 1253 (1961). ↑
8. Astonishingly, Oliver Morton Dickerson’s American Colonial Government, which was published in 1912, remains the authoritative source on the mechanics of imperial disallowance. ↑
9. See Mary Sarah Bilder, Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law, in Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz 28, 43 (Daniel W. Hamilton & Alfred L. Brophy eds., 2009). ↑
10. Id. ↑
11. Id. ↑
12. William E. Nelson, The Law of Colonial Maryland: Virginia Without Its Grandeur, 54 Am. J. Legal Hist. 168, 198–99 (2014). ↑
13. Mary Carroll Johansen, The Relationship Between the Board of Trade and Plantations and the Colonial Government of Virginia, 1696–1775, at 38 (1992) (unpublished M.A. thesis, The College of William & Mary) (on file with The College of William & Mary Libraries). ↑
14. Michael P. Zuckert, Judicial Review and the Incomplete Constitution: A Madisonian Perspective on the Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism, in The Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism 53, 55 (Steven Kautz et al. eds., 2009). ↑
15. Charles Evans Hughes, James Madison, 18 A.B.A. J. 854, 854 (1932) (referring to Madison as the “Father of the Constitution”); see also Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Being Seen Like a State: How Americans (and Britons) Built the Constitutional Infrastructure of a Developing Nation, 59 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1239, 1269 (2018) (“His theory of factional checks and balances is why many consider him the most thoughtful constitution maker.”). ↑
16. Zuckert, supra note 13, at 55. ↑
17. LaCroix, supra note 5, at 464. ↑
18. Zuckert, supra note 13, at 55. ↑
19. See Steven G. Calabresi, Originalism and James Bradley Thayer, 113 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1419, 1450–51 (2019) (building on James Bradley Thayer’s discussion of Madison’s proposed continuation of the imperial practice of legislative review); see also Sean Gailmard, Imperial Politics, English Law, and the Strategic Foundations of Constitutional Review in America, 113 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 778, 788 (2019) (“My argument is that delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 recognized and sought to preserve benefits of Crown review by the Privy Council as an external bound on legislation.”). ↑
20. Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 granted federal courts jurisdiction over state courts in matters where “the validity of a statute” is drawn into question “on the ground of their being repugnant to the constitution.” Judiciary Act of Sept. 24, 1789, ch. 20, § 25, 1 Stat. 73, 85. In essence, the federal courts were empowered, much like the Board and the Privy Council, with the duty to enforce the repugnancy principle against state and federal legislation that conflicted, not with the laws of England, but with the text of the Constitution. ↑
21. Indeed, Professor Jordan Cash has observed that “judicial review had long been practiced in Virginia, and the English jurisdictional tradition continued to be influential into the early national period.” Jordan T. Cash, The Court and the Old Dominion: Judicial Review Among the Virginia Jeffersonians, 35 Law & Hist. Rev. 351, 365 (2017). Although less general than most accounts, Professor Cash’s assertion still paints with too broad a brush, as it does not explore British imperial oversight’s influence upon Madison’s proposed constitutional solutions. ↑

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