Significance
In his dissent in the 1938 case of Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black wrote "in 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, decided for the first time that the word 'person' in the amendment did in some instances include corporations. The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments. The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations."
Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1949, "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions. Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives."
Read more about this topic: Santa Clara County V. Southern Pacific Railroad
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)