Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750-1900

Abstract

who wrote comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Guillaume Frencia, Brittany Adams, and Ben Nelson, who assisted us with research. In addition, we benefited from valuable feedback from the anonymous referees for the University of Chicago Press and from the participants at preparatory conferences sponsored by NBER and the Yale Program in Economic History in 2012, 2013, and 2014. For acknowledgments, sources of research support, and disclosure of the authors' material financial relationships, if any, please see http:// www .nber .org /chapters /c13511 .ack. 232 Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi R. Lamoreaux of Hutchins's widow and son, the will's executor asked the state's Chancery Court to invalidate the bequest. Since the American Revolution, state courts and statutes had overturned dozens of similar wills leaving legacies to unincorporated associations. 3 The outcome of this case proved no different. New Jersey's Chancery Court rejected Hutchins's bequests on what were in effect political grounds. The legal question at the heart of the case, according to Vice Chancellor John Taylor Bird, was "What is a charity?" 4 Reviewing the precedents, Bird conceded that some types of voluntary associations, such as evangelical missionary societies, were routinely regarded as charitable even though they aimed to destroy "existing laws, customs, institutions, and religions." 5 He also acknowledged two recent path-breaking decisions by the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania supreme courts that defined charity widely enough to encompass bequests for the dissemination of abolitionist and atheist ideas (albeit only on the condition that the trustees accept their primary goal to be education and not opposition to the law or Christianity). 6 In Bird's view, however, the purposes of the book fund were more fundamentally subversive. George's vilification of private landholding posed too great a threat to the law for the trust to stand. "Whatever might be the rights of the individual author in the discussion of such questions in the abstract, it certainly would not become the court to aid in the distribution of literature which denounces as robbery-as a crime-an immense proportion of the judicial determinations of the higher courts. This would not be legally charitable." 7 George successfully appealed to New Jersey's high court the following year, but the damage was done. Reversing the Chancery Court's verdict, Chief Justice Mercer Beazley ruled the key issue was not George's radicalism but Hutchins's intentions. The will itself, which benignly described George's works as "spreading the light" of "liberty and justice in these United States of America," disclosed no inclination to violate the law. Rather the book fund, Beazley concluded, was best understood as akin to a library and, therefore, stood squarely within the "charitable" domain of education. 8 Nonetheless, George's hard-won victory brought little satisfaction to him and his followers. According to a biography written later by his son, legal fees devoured a sizable portion of th...

The Corporate Baby in the Bathwater: Why Proposals to Abolish Corporate Personhood Are Misguided

“…Disfavored political and social groups linked with the abolition of slavery, the labor movement, religious minorities, and even literary clubs, were denied this right. Their weak ability to own property in perpetuity and mobilize pooled resources in the pursuit of common goals despite fluctuating memberships left them small and ephemeral (Bloch & Lamoreaux, 2017). The growth of general incorporation laws over the course of the 19th century was a major boon for such organizations, as was their gradual assertion of due process and other constitutional protections, which allowed, for instance, their members and donors to protect their anonymity.…”