The history of corporate personhood entering into the American legal system is absolutely bonkers. This whole article is worth a read, but I'll pull out the short version too
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corpora...How did this idea enter the legal system? This is the work of a few men.
Justice Stephen J. Field was angry about the case Santa Clara County v Souther Pacific Railroad. He was incensed because the court refused to answer the question of whether or not corporations were people.
> When the Court issued its decision on this second case, the justices expressly declined to decide if corporations were people. The dispute could be, and was, resolved on other grounds, prompting an angry rebuke from one justice, Stephen J. Field, who castigated his colleagues for failing to address “the important constitutional questions involved.” “At the present day, nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations,” he wrote, and they deserved to know if they had equal rights too.
The mechanism that decisions were communicated in the 1880s was to publish official volumes of decisions. J.C. Bancroft Davis acted as the court reporter for the volume containing this case and wrote up an inaccurate summary of the case.
> The reporter in the 1880s was J. C. Bancroft Davis, whose wildly inaccurate summary of the Southern Pacific case said that the Court had ruled that “corporations are persons within … the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whether his summary was an error or something more nefarious—Davis had once been the president of the Newburgh and New York Railway company—will likely never be known.
Justic Field seized upon the incorrect summary and would inject his preferred reality into an unrelated case.
> Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.
It is that completely made up precedent that then became the foundation for legal corporate personhood.