Corporation

The word corporation derives from the Latin corpus, meaning body.1 In Roman law, a corpus fictum, a fictitious body, could be formed when multiple persons were recognized as a single legal entity. Cities were the first entities Romans treated this way. Over time, the concept extended to community organizations called collegia, which included artisan associations, religious societies, and social clubs.

The Late Latin corporatio originally described the assumption of a body and was used in reference to the incarnation of Christ. The noun derived from the verb corporare, meaning to form into a body.2

Medieval Europe revived the Roman concept through the recovery of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. Churches, monasteries, universities, and local governments, including the City of London Corporation, were all chartered as corporations.3 The key innovation was perpetual succession. The company would survive longer than any individual member.

In English, the word first appeared around 1450 to describe persons united in a body for some purpose. The modern legal meaning, an artificial person created by law from a group of persons, dates to the 1610s.4

The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, became the first corporation to issue public shares and trade them on a stock exchange.5 The English East India Company, chartered in 1600, wielded military power on behalf of the state. These were not merely businesses. They were instruments of empire, authorized to wage war, sign treaties, and govern territories.

The American adaptation transformed the form again. In 1886, the Supreme Court's decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was recorded as having recognized corporations as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.6 The Latin word for body, originally a metaphor for a group acting as one, had become the legal foundation for an entity with many of the rights of an individual person and none of the mortality.