Best Commercial Ever?

This is Super Bowl week, which means commercials are front and center. This one will not be airing, but should.

Dollars and No Sense: Money = Free Speech, Zombies Rule

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.  Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
--Chief Justice John Marshall in in Dartmouth College v. Woodward



Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with taxation of railroad properties. The case is most notable for the obiter dictum statement that corporations are entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

At the California Constitutional Convention of 1878-79, the state legislature drew up a new constitution that denied railroads "the right to deduct the amount of their debts [i.e., mortgages] from the taxable value of their property, a right which was given to individuals."  Southern Pacific Railroad Company refused to pay taxes under these new changes. The taxpaying railroads challenged this law, based on a conflicting federal statute of 1866 which gave them privileges inconsistent with state taxation.

San Mateo County, along with neighboring counties, filed suit against the railroads to recoup the massive losses in tax revenue stemming from Southern Pacific's refusal to pay. After hearing arguments in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the California Supreme Court sided with the county. Using the Jurisdiction and Removal Act of 1875, a law created so black litigants could bypass hostile southern state courts if they were denied justice, Southern Pacific was able to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decisions reached by the Supreme Court are promulgated to the legal community by way of books called United States Reports. Preceding every case entry is a headnote, a short summary in which a court reporter summarizes the opinion as well as outlining the main facts and arguments. For example, in U.S. v. Detroit Timber and Lumber (1905), headnotes are defined as "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession."

Bancroft Davis, the Court Reporter and former president of Newburgh and New York Railway, wrote the following as part of the headnote for the case:

"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

In other words, corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as did natural persons. However, this issue is absent from the court's opinion itself and in fact is not at all representative of the court's opinion.

The rest is history.

A Day to Remember

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

-- Martin Luther King in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

Help Haiti Through Partners in Health

Tracy Kidder is a journalist I greatly admire. His book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, chronicles Paul Farmer and his Partners in Health organization, which has twenty years of service experience in Haiti. There is an old Haitian proverb of “Beyond mountains there are mountains”—as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

Haiti has no shortage of mountainous problems. Please support Partners in Health's efforts by clicking through to their Stand with Haiti link and donating what you can.

Doomsday Clock Setback

Doomsday Clock Moves 1 Minute Back

By Larry Greenemeier   Scientific American

The human race can breathe a tiny bit easier (but not too much) now that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hand of its Doomsday Clock one minute farther away from midnight, the time which symbolizes catastrophic destruction and the apocalyptic end of civilization. The clock now reads six minutes from that end-of-days witching hour after it was changed during a press conference Thursday in New York City, citing an increased awareness and interest in stopping key threats to humanity (in particular nuclear conflict and global warming) since U.S. President Barack Obama took office about a year ago.

But the Bulletin, a group established shortly after World War II by the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, tempered its actions with the major caveat that humankind could slip closer to oblivion again if the world's governments do not follow through on promises made to curb the creation of more nuclear weapons and greenhouse gases. Although the Bulletin was originally formed out of concern for global nuclear annihilation, the group has since broadened its purview to include the world's vulnerability to climate change.
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