a suit against Southern Pacific brought by the California county of Santa Clara was argued before the Supreme Court. The case became the occasion for a legal imbroglio that resulted in the stunning and epochal doctrine of “corporate personhood”: the notion that “artificial persons” like corporations should, like flesh and blood citizens, be covered by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Like Victor Frankenstein with his monster, the court had brought animism and agency to something that no-one had ever considered alive before. A new kind of entity was conjured onto the world stage: the corporate person, an egregore of enterprise, a golem of capital, technology, and law.