Gale Encyclopedia Of American Law 3Rd Edition Volume 8 P51 pptx

SANCTION
To assent, concur, confirm, approve, or ratify. The
part of a law that is designed to secure enforcement
by imposing a penalty for violation of the law or
offering a reward for its observance. A punitive act
taken by one nation against another nation that
has violated a treaty or
INTERNATIONAL LAW.
Sanction is a broad term with different
meanings in different contexts. It can be used to
describe tacit or explicit approval. Used in this
sense, the term usually is used in assigning
liability to a party who was not actively involved
in wrongdoing but who did nothing to prevent
it. For example, if the upper-level managers of a
business knew that their employees were using
unfair employment practices and did nothing to
stop them, it may be said that the managers
sanctioned the unfair practices.
The term sanction also can describe dis-
agreement and condemnation. In
CRIMINAL LAW,
a sanction is the punishment for a criminal
offense. The criminal sanction for a criminal
DEFENDANT varies according to the crime and
includes such me asures as death,
INCARCERATION,
PROBATION, COMMUNITY SERVICE, and monetary
fines.
In
CIVIL LAW, a sanction is that part of a law

that assigns a penalty for violation of the law’s
provisions. The most common civil sanction is
a monetary fine, but other types of sanctions
exist. Depending on the case, a sanction may be
the suspension or revocation of a business,
professional, or hobby license, or a court order
commanding a person to do or refrain from
doing something. A sanction may even be
tailored to the case at hand. For instance, under
Rule 37 of the Federal Rules of
CIVIL PROCEDURE,
if a party refuses to obey a discovery order, or an
order to relinquish requested evidence, the
court may order that the evidence sought be
automatically construed in favor of the request-
ing party, refuse to allow the disobedient party
to make claims or defenses related to the
evidence, stay or postpone the case until the
discovery order is obeyed, dismiss the action or
render judgment for the requesting party,
declare the disobedient party in
CONTEMPT of
court, or make any other order that is just under
the circumstances.
In civil
LITIGATION, sanctions are slightly
different from remedies. A remedy is the relief
accorded to a victorious litigant. The remedy
may be money damages, an order that forbids
or commands the opposing party or parties to

do or refrain from doing a certain act or acts, or
some other result favorable to the victorious
litigant. Remedies are not always intended to
punish a person, while sanctions are always
punitive. Nevertheless, remedies and sanctions
are similar in that they refer to a loss that a civil
litigant must bear if she is found liable for a civil
wrong.
In some cases a party may have to remedy
another party’s loss as well as suffer criminal
and civil sanctions, all for the same act. For
example, if an attorney is professionally negli-
gent in his handling of a client’s case and steals
funds from the client’s trust account, the
attorney may face a
MALPRACTICE civil suit from
the aggrieved client in which the client asks for
money as a remedy for the malpractice. The
attorney also may suffer sanctions from the
professional conduct committee of the state bar
association and criminal sanctions from a
prosecution for the theft.
The contempt-of-court offense provides a
flexible form of sanction. Contempt-of-court
sanctions may be either civil or criminal. The
court may order a party to pay a fine or suffer
some setback in the case (civil contempt), or it
may order that the party be placed in jail
(criminal contempt). The basic difference
between the two is that criminal contempt is

an act of disrespect toward the court, whereas
civil contempt acts tend to be less offensive
transgressions, such as the unintentional failure
to comply with discovery orders or to perform
other acts ordered by the court.
Most courts possess inherent authority to
sanction attorneys or parties for misconduct
that occurs during a legal proceeding. However,
judges must be careful to issue sanctions in an
impartial ma nner. Attorneys and parties w ho
face judicial sanctions can ask the judge to
RECUSE himself or herself from the matter if they
believe the judge is incapable of making a fair
determination. A denial of a motio n to recuse is
appealable, and
APPELLATE courts will closely
scrutinize the circumstances of the denial. For
example, the Arkansas
SUPREME COURT ruled that
a trial court judge should have recused himself
before issuing sanctions against an attorney
because the trial judge had an obvious bias
toward the atto rney. According to the state
supreme court, the trial court judge repeatedly
shut off the attorney when the attorney sought
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
488 SANCTION
answers to his questions, telling the attorney,
“I’m not up here to answer your questions.”
The trial judge also told the attorney that

“I can do anything I want to. I’m the judge.”
Allen v. Rut ledge, 355 Ark. 392, 139 S.W.3d 491
(2003);
One type of non-judicial form of sanction is
an
ADMINISTRATIVE AGENCY sanction against a
corporation. Corporations must follow various
rules passed by federal, state, and local admin-
istrative agencies authorized by lawmaking
bodies to regulate specific topics of government
concern. If a business does not obey agency
rules that apply to it, it may face sanctions levied
by the administrative agency responsible for
enforcing the rules. For example, federal and
state environmental protection agencies are
authorized by statute to levy fines against
businesses that violate environmental laws and
regulations.
An international sanction is a special form
of sanction taken by one country against
another. International sanctions are measures
that are designed to bring a delinquent or
renegade state into compliance with expected
rules of conduct. International sanctions may be
either non-forceful or military. Military sanc-
tions can range from cutting off access to
limited strikes to full-scale war. Non-forcef ul
international sanctions include diplomatic mea-
sures, such as the withdrawal of an ambassador,
the severing of diplomatic relations, or the filing

of a protest with the
UNITED NATIONS; financial
sanctions such as denying aid or cutting off
access to financial institutions; and economic
sanctions such as partial or total trade embar-
goes. The U.N. Security Council has the
authority to impose econom ic and military
sanctions on nations that pose a threat to peace.
FURTHER READINGS
“Limits of the Criminal Sanction.” 2002. New Jersey Law
Journal (July 29).
Pate, William H. 2002. “To Sanction or Not to Sanction: Why
Arguing against the Court’s Precedent Is Not an
Automatic Rule 11 Violation.” Campbell Law Review 25
(fall).
v
SANFORD, EDWARD TERRY
An important influence on the develop ment of
civil liberties, Edward Terry Sanford served on
the U.S. Supreme Court from 1923 to 1930.
Sanford was a native of Tennessee with a
cosmopolitan education, and before serving on
the Court, he had a
PRIVATE LAW practice, served
in the
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, and was a federal
district judge in his home state for 14 years.
While on the Court, Sanford’s views were largely
moderate, and in his lifetime he was over-
shadowed by his highly visible contemporaries.

Nonetheless, Sanford’s opinions on civil liberties
helped advance the guarantees of the
BILL OF
RIGHTS
: in two major opinions delivered in the
1920s, he laid the groundwork for modern
Supreme Court decisions that restrict the power
of states to limit
FIRST AMENDMENT rights to
FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
Sanford was born in Knoxville, Tennessee,
on July 23, 1865, the son of a lumber and
construction millionaire. He earned four
degrees from the University of Tennessee and
Harvard, and studied languages in France and
Germany. At Harvard Law School, he distin-
guished himself as the editor of the Harvard
Law Review and graduated magna cum laude.
He began practicing law in Tennessee in the
1890s. He then lectured in law at the University
of Tennessee from 1898 to 1906 before moving
to Washington, D.C., for his first federal job.
▼▼
▼▼
Edward Terry Sanford 1865–1930
18501850
19001900
19251925
19501950
18751875

❖
1865 Born,
Knoxville,
Tenn.
1861–65
U.S. Civil War
◆
1883
Earned
B.A. from
University
of Tenn.
◆
1889 Earned
M.A. and LL.B.
from Harvard
University
◆◆
1906 Appointed
special assistant
prosecutor to U.S.
attorney general
1907 Appointed assistant U.S. attorney general
1914–18
World War I
1908–23 Served as
associate justice of
the U.S. District
Court in Tenn.
1939–45

World War II
1930 Died,
Washington, D.C.
◆
❖
1923–30 Served as associate
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
1925 Wrote majority opinion in Gitlow v. New York
1927 Wrote majority opinion in Fiske v. Kansas
◆
WE MAY AND DO
ASSUME THAT THE
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
AND OF THE
PRESS ARE AMONG
THE FUNDAMENTAL
PERSONAL RIGHTS
AND LIBERTIES
PROTECTED FROM
IMPAIRMENT BY THE
STATES.
—EDWARD T.
S
ANFORD
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
SANFORD, EDWARD TERRY 489
Sanford’s federal law career began in
prosecution and rapidly took him to the federal
bench. He joined the Justice Department in
1906 as a special assistant prosecutor, and a year

later he was made an assistant attorney general.
By 1908, Sanford returned to Tennessee as a
federal district judge, a positio n he held until
1923. His specialties were
BANKRUPTCY and
EQUITY cases. On the bench, he developed a
reputation for open-mindedness, fairness, and
leniency, at times reversing his own decisions.
He was highly driven and nervously energetic,
and would pace and chain-smoke in his
chambers while considering his busy docket.
In 1923 Sanford’snominationtotheSu-
preme Court came at the behest of his friends,
Chief Justice
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT and Attorney
General
HARRY M. DAUGHERTY.Thetwomen
convinced President
WARREN G. HARDING of
Sanford’s breadth of education and varied
experience, which included service on the
LEAGUE
OF NATIONS
. The nomination succeeded easily in
the Senate, and Sanford sat on the Court for
seven years until his death in 1930. He wrote
130 opinions, many of them addressing issues
related to government, business, and especially
bankruptcy.
Although neglected by history because of the

accomplishments of his celebrated contemporar-
ies, Sanford made a major contribution in the
area of civil liberties. In particular, he helped
develop the so-called incorporation doctrine—
the Supreme Court’s view that the Bill of Rights
applies not only to the federal government but
also, in large part, to the states. During much
of the nineteenth century, states conferred
fewer rights upon their citizens than those
extended by the federal Bill of Rights, even after
RATIFICATION of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT.With
the intervention of the Supreme Court, this
began to change at the turn of the century. In the
mid-1920s Sanford helped effect the change
in two important cases concerning freedom
of speech.
The first case dealt with a state’s power to
control the press. In
GITLOW V. NEW YORK, 268
U.S. 652, 45 S. Ct. 625, 69 L. Ed. 1138 (1925),
the Court considered New York’s conviction of
a leftist auth or under the state’s
ANARCHY law of
1902. The broader question for the Court was,
Should the First Amendment be extended to the
states? Sanford’s opinion upheld the convic tion
because, in the Court’s view, states should be
free to prosecute citizens who advocate violent
overthrow of government. But on the broader
question of the Bill of Rights, Sanford wrote in

DICTA that the First Amendment applied to the
states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Gitlow planted the seed for the incorporation
of the First Amendment, and for subsequent
cases in which the Court would strike down
state laws that violated the First Amendment. In
1927 the Court upheld a defense based on the
doctrine enunciated in Gitlow in Fiske v. Kansas,
274 U.S. 380, 47 S. Ct. 655, 71 L. Ed. 1108. In
his opinion, Sanford underscored that states
must guarantee First Amendment rights.
Throughout his tenure on the Court,
Sanford voted consistently with Chief Justice
Taft. Sanford died at age 64 on March 8, 1930—
the same day that Taft died.
FURTHER READINGS
Friedman, Leon, and Fred L. Israel, eds. 1995. The Justices of
the United States Supreme Court, 1789–1969: Their Lives
and Major Opinions. New York: Chelsea House.
v
SANGER, MARGARET HIGGINS
A feminist and founder of the Planned Parent-
hood
FEDERATION of America, Margaret Higgins
Sanger battled the government and the Roman
Catholic Church to establish the legitimacy of
BIRTH CONTROL.
Edward T. Sanford.
COLLECTION OF THE
SUPREME COURT OF THE

UNITED STATES
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
490 SANGER, MARGARET HIGGINS
Sanger was born September 14, 1879, in
Corning, New York, to Michael Higgins, an
Irish stonecutter, and Annie Purcell Higgins, the
daughter of an Irish day laborer. Sanger’s
mother, who had five more children and
suffered chronic tuberculosis, died at the age
of 50 in 1899. Sanger blamed her mother’s
death on the strain of bearing eleven children.
Following her mother’s death, Sanger began
nursing training at White Plains Hospital. She
often accompanied doctors to patients’ home s
to deliver babies, and she frequently had to
deliver children herself. Many of the new
mothers asked Sanger what they could do to
prevent another pregnancy. She, in turn, asked
the doctors, but they gave her no information
and took little interest in the women’s dilemma.
While completing her nursing training,
Sanger met William Sanger, an architect, whom
she married in 1902. He was a Ger man Jew and
a socialist who was active in the radical causes of
the day.
By 1912 the Sangers and their three
children had moved to Greenwich Village,
where the couple became involved in politics
and the arts and entertained some of the most
radical intellectuals of the time. Sanger became

deeply involved with the
SOCIALIST PARTY. While
recruiting for the organization, she visited many
working-class families with six and seven
children that were forced to make their home
in two- and three-room tenements. She found
that the women lived in dread of having more
children and the resulting increas e in poverty,
and she concluded that women needed the right
to control their own bodies.
She soon began speaking publicly on the
problems of family life, connecting the size of
the family with the economic problems of the
working class. Her speeches became so popular
that she was asked to turn them into a series of
articles for the Call, a New York socialist
newspaper. In her 12-week series, entitled
“What Every Woman Should Know,” Sanger
explained puber ty, the reproductive organs, and
sexually transmitted diseases. After the paper
printed an article about gonorrhea, the authori-
ties threatened that if it published a planned
article on syphilis, its mailing permit would be
canceled under the Comstock Act of 1873, a
▼▼
▼▼
Margaret Higgins Sanger 1879–1966
1875
1925
1950

1975
1900
❖
1879 Born,
Corning, N.Y.
1914–18
World War I
1939–45
World War II
❖
◆
1914 First issue of Woman Rebel published;
indicted under the Comstock Act for the
mailing of obscene material
◆
1916 Opened first U.S. birth control clinic; served 30
days in prison for distributing birth control information
◆
1918 Crane decision allowed doctors to
give out birth control information
◆
1923
Opened
the Birth
Control
Clinical
Research
Bureau
◆
1921 Formed the American Birth Control League

◆
1931
Testified
before
Congress
concerning
the Doctor's
Bill
◆
◆
◆
1952 Helped found the
International Planned
Parenthood Federation
1942 Birth Control Federation of America renamed
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
◆
1960 Birth control pills first marketed
1936 U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in United States v. One Package
that the Comstock Act did not apply to physicians' packages
1950–53
Korean War
1961–73
Vietnam War
1966 Received the
Presidential Medal of
Valor; died, Tucson, Ariz.
Margaret Sanger.
AP IMAGES
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION

SANGER, MARGARET HIGGINS 491
strict CENSORSHIP law that barred the mailing of
“obscene” material. The law was named for
Anthony Comstock, a special agent of the post
office with authority to open the mail and
determine whether materials were obscene.
Along with her speaking and writing, Sanger
returned to nursing in New York and spent much
of her time assisting with home births and living
with the families for several weeks afterward. She
observed that the women had repeated pregnan-
cies and were obsessed with methods of prevent-
ing conception. They sought illegal and cheap
ABORTIONS, which often caused injury or death,
and tried dangerous cures of their own, such as
drinking turpentine and inserting instruments
into the uterus. After one woman died following
her second self-induced
ABORTION,Sangerwas
distraught and walked the streets for hours before
returning home. That night, Sanger decided to
devote her life to educating women about their
bodies and methods of contraception.
Sanger began her work by scouring libraries
for information on preventing conception. After
months of reading and r esearch, she was
convinced that no practical information existed
in the United States, and she traveled to France
with her family. In Paris Sanger found that French
women were well versed in contraceptive meth-

ods. She talked to druggists, midwives, doctors,
and w orking women, and noted formulas for
suppositories and douches, which she planned to
write up as a pamphlet for U.S. women.
Returning home to New York, she began
publishing a monthly magazine called the
Woman Rebel. She deliberately decided to use
the publication to engage in a frank discussion of
women’s liberation from the fear and reality of
unplanned pregnancies, knowing that she would
soon run afoul of Anthony Comstock. Sanger
realized that the new movement needed a name,
and after much discussion, she and a group of
supporters agreed to call it birth control.
In April 1914, four weeks after the first issue
of the Woman Rebel was p ublis hed, t he po st
office notified Sanger that the magazine
was unmailable under the Comstock Act. While
she skirmished with Comstock over her maga-
zine, Sanger worked on her pamphlet on
contraceptive techni ques, c alled Family Li mita -
tion, in which she described the practical
knowledge she had gathered in Europe. Sanger
visited 22 printers in one week, trying to find
someone who would produce the pamphlet.
Finally, 100,000 copies were printed, addressed,
and stored in S an Fr ancisco, Chicago, and
Pittsburgh, to be mailed on her prearranged
signal, when she thought she would be safe from
Comstock’s interference.

In August 1914, Sanger was indicted on
charges of violating the Comstock Act. When it
became clear that the judge hearing her case was
biased against her, she fled to Europe to gain time
to prepare her case properly. She sailed from
Canada under a false name and without a
passport. From the ship, where she was safely
outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, Sanger sent
telegrams containing the prearranged code word
that indicated it was time to send out her
pamphlet on contraception. After landing in
Liverpool, she traveled on to London, where news
of the Woman Rebel had made her a celebrity in
radical circles. She later moved to Holland, which
had the lowest infant death rate in the world and
where all mothers were taught about contracep-
tion. There, Sanger learned how to examine
women and advise them on which of the 15
available birth control devices were appropriate.
As a result of her experience in Europe, she
learned the necessity of the medical community’s
involvement in the birth control movement and
the importance of keeping thorough records and
conducting follow-up studies.
In October 1915 Sanger sailed home. She
contacted the district attorney about her case,
and a hearing was scheduled for the following
January. But in November 1915, the Sangers’
daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia, and
Sanger sank into a severe depression. She

insisted on going ahead with her trial, however,
and received an outp ouring of support from
people across the country who had heard of her
loss. Eventually the charges were dismissed on
the grounds that they were two years old and
that Sanger had not made a practice of
publishing obscene articles. Although this
dismissal prevented the Comstock Act from
being challenged in the courts, the publicity
surrounding Sanger’s case made the entire
country aware of the birth control movement.
Sanger next notified her supporters of her
intent to establish free clinics throughout the
country, at which women could receive instruc-
tion in birth control. Sanger rented a storefront
tenement in the Brownsville section of Brook-
lyn, where many newly arrived immigrants
lived. The three women printed 5,000 circulars
A FREE RACE CANNOT
BE BORN OF SLAVE
MOTHERS
.
—MARGARET SANGER
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
492 SANGER, MARGARET HIGGINS
in English, Yiddish, and Italian, advertising the
clinic and offering contraceptive information
for ten cents, and posted them around the
neighborhood. The posters read, “Mothers! Can
you afford to have a large family? Do you want

any more children? If not, why do you have
them?”
In October 1916 Sanger, along with her
sister Ethel Byrne, who was a nurse, and Fania
Mindell, another supporter, opened the first
birth control clinic in the United States. After
only nine days, more than 400 women had
come to the clinic for assistance. Among them
was an undercover policewoman, who arrested
Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell and confiscated all
the patient records, pamphlets, and contra-
ceptives. The women were charged with dis-
seminating birth control information and
maintaining a public
NUISANCE.Byrnewasfound
guilty and sentenced to 30 days in jail, where she
nearly died from a hunger strike before the
governor pardoned her. Mindell was found
guilty of selling copies of “What Every Woman
Should Know” and fined 50 dollars. Sanger was
convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the
workhouse, where she gave lectures on birth
control to the other inmates and taught them to
read and write.
After her release, Sanger decided to focus on
changing the laws on contraception and edu-
cating women about birth control techniques.
Her conviction for running the birth control
clinic had been upheld by the New York
Supreme Court in People v. Sanger, 179 App.

Div. 939, 166 N.Y.S. 1107 (1917), and she
appealed to the state’s high court, the New York
Court of Appeals. In January 1918, in an
opinion that became known as the Crane
decision after the authoring judge, Frederick
Crane, the appellate court upheld the lower
court (Sanger, 222 N.Y. 192, 118 N.E. 637). But
the court interpreted the criminal laws broadly,
holding that doctors could give out birth
control information to any married person to
protect his or her health. This meant that clinics
could operate freely and that they would be
under the supervision of medical personnel,
where Sanger thought they belonged.
By 1920 more than 25 birth control
leagues were operating, and Mindell’sconvic-
tion for distributing literature about contra-
ception was reversed, which meant that
pamphlets and books could more easily be
distributed. In 1921 Sanger formed the Ameri-
can Birth Control League. The Catholic
Ch urch came to lead the opposition to Sanger’s
efforts, and she continued to battle the church
throughout her life.
Sanger attacked the Comstock law, estab-
lishing the National Committee for Federal
Legislation for Birth Control, headquartered in
Washington, D.C., to gather support for federal
legislation dubbed the Doctor’s Bill. By 1931
hundreds of medical, political, religious, and

labor organizations supported the bill. When
Sanger appeared before a subcommittee of the
Senate Judicial Committee in February 1931,
she testified that based on statistics for the
period since the Comstock Act took effect in
1873, one-and-a-half million women had died
during pregnancy and childbirth; 700,000 illegal
abortions had been performed each year; and
fifteen million children had died during their
first year because of poverty or their mothe r’s
poor health. But the proposed legislation was
vehemently oppos ed by the Catholic Church,
the Patriotic Society, the Purity League, and
other groups, and was defeated.
After further attempts to pass the legislation
were unsuccessful, Sanger decided to turn to the
courts. In 1933, she had a new type of pessary
(vaginal suppository) sent to Dr. Hannah Stone,
in New York, but the package was seized under
the Comstock Act. Stone filed charges. After a
trial, the court ruled that the doctor was entitled
to the package (United States v. One Package, 13
F. Supp. 334 [S.D.N.Y. 1936]). The government
appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Second Circu it, which upheld the lower court,
ruling that the aim of the Comstock law was not
to “prevent the importation, sale, or carriage by
mail of things which might intelligently be
employed by conscientious and competent
physicians for the purpose of saving life or

promoting the well being of their patients” (One
Package, 86 F.2d 737 [2d Cir. 1936]). In 1937
the
AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION adopted the
position that all doctors should receive infor-
mation about the legal dispensation of contra-
ceptives and that new contraceptive techniques
should be studied.
In 1939 the Birth Control Clinical Research
Bureau and the Birth Control League merged
into the Birth Control Federation of Ame rica,
which was renamed the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America in 1942. Sanger
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
SANGER, MARGARET HIGGINS 493
continued her work, initiating birth control
programs in rural clinics. Here, she decided that
the relatively expensive and difficult-to-use
diaphragm was impractical and that women
needed a birth control pill or injection. In the
1950s she supported the work of Dr. Gregory
Pincus, whose research eventually produced the
birth control pill.
In 1966, at the age of 82, Sanger received the
Presidential Medal of Valor from
LYNDON B.
JOHNSON. Later that year, on Septemb er 6, 1966,
she died in Tucson, Arizona.
FURTHER READINGS
Chesler, Ellen. 1992. Women of Valor: Margaret Sanger and

the Birth Control Movement in America. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Coigney, Virginia. 1969. Margaret Sanger: Rebel with a
Cause. New York: Doubleday.
Reed, Miriam. 2003. Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words.
Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books.
Sanger, Margaret. 2004. The Autobiography of Margaret
Sanger. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover.
Topalian, Elyse. 1984. Margaret Sanger. New York: Watts.
CROSS REFERENCES
Griswold v. Connecticut; Women’s Rights.
SANITY
Reasonable understanding; sound mind; posses-
sing mental faculties that are capable of distin-
guishing right from wrong so as to bear legal
responsibility for one’s actions.
SANTA CLARA COUNTY V.
SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD
COMPANY
An 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Santa
Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
Company, 118 U.S. 394, 6 S. Ct. 1132, 30 L.
Ed. 118, has been interpreted that the term
person as used in the
EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE of
the
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT applies to corpora-
tions as well as to natural persons.
The Southern Pacific Railroad Company
refused to pay a tax assessed by the California

Board of Equalization upon its franchise, road-
ways, roadbeds, fences, and rolling stock. The
county brought an action in state court against
the railroad to recover the delinquent taxes. The
railroad had the action removed to the federal
district court. The court agreed with the
defendant that the assessment of the tax was
void because the board had no jurisdiction to
act. It also ruled that the defendant had been
denied equal protection of the law because the
assessment of the property was made at full
monetary value without the discount that was
given to individual property owners for out-
standing mortgages on their property. The
county filed a writ of error to the federal court,
and the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case.
The Court agreed with the railroad that the
state board had no jurisdiction to assess the tax.
The assessment of taxes by the board on fences
belonging to the railroad was deemed void
because the board was authorized by the state
constitution to assess only “the franchise, road-
way roadbed, rails, and rolling stock.” The Court
rejected the argument that the fences constituted
part of the roadway for purposes of taxation. The
constitution required a separate assessment for
“land, and improvements thereon” and a state
statute expressly included the term fence within
the categories of improvements. The state board
acting through the county sought to have the

plaintiff liable for a single sum, incorporating
taxes assessed upon various types of property,
including property that the board had no power
to assess. The Court declared that since part of the
assessment was illegal, it could not support an
action for the county to recover the entire tax;
therefore, it affirmed the judgment for the
defendants.
The Court did not explicitly discuss the
Fourteenth Amendment in its opinion, basing
its decision on the invalidity of the assessment.
In its statement of the facts of the case, it did,
however, set out the Fourteenth Amendment
claims of the railroad. The California constitu-
tion denied “railroads and other quasi public
corporations” equal protection of laws as
guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution because the board did not
reduce the value of property for assessment
purposes by the amount of any outstanding
mortgage debts on it, as it did for property
owned by natural persons or other corpora-
tions. Although the Supreme Court did not
specifically rule on the constitutionality of the
treatment of the railroad by the state, the case of
County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific
Railroad Company is interpreted to support
the principle that both corporations and natural
persons are entitled to equal protection of laws
pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the

Constitution.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
494 SANITY