Proposed by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the states two years later, the Amendment sought to protect the newly freed slaves. Indeed, not one word in the legislative history of the Amendment suggests otherwise. Yet the Court blithely pronounced the corporation a person, albeit it stopped short of giving it freedom of religion. We are all of the opinion that it does. Seventy years later, dissenting in Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson , Justice Black ridiculed the notion that either the Amendment's language or history justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection.
Corporations have neither race nor color.
The contrast with Roe v. Wade is stark. One of their idols is Robert H. Bork, the former Yale law professor and federal appeals court judge who was nominated for the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987. The ball on which to keep the eye is not whether either Roe or Santa Clara was correctly or incorrectly decided. Rather, it's the Senate Judiciary Committee. No member asks a judicial nominee who denounces Roe whether logic does not compel him or her to denounce Santa Clara , too.