Corporations in the U.S. are formed by charters at the state government level in the U.S. The notion of a corporation goes back to the origins of the joint-stock company. During the colonial and early American republic period, the corporation as an "artificial person" was widely accepted, but it was not assumed to be the same thing as a real person. After the U.S. Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), corporations have been steadily increasing in power, to the point of controlling, for all practical purposes, the levers of power in the U.S.
Corporate Personhood
The American notion of corporate personhood has typically been seen by corporations as protection against government power. It has been common for corporations to claim protections of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments in particular. That is, they have claimed protection of speech, most recently through the right to donate money to political campaigns; protection against incriminating themselves, as in not releasing documents that could be used against them; and the protections of their "civil rights" by the federal government. Critics of corporate personhood argue that real people have inadequate protections against these corporate "people," who are incredibly wealthy but do not die, and are not living, breathing humans.
The court case mentioned above supposedly established corporate personhood even though it was one of the court clerks, Bancroft Davis, who wrote in a decision that the Court would not hear arguments regarding the protection of a corporation's civil rights from state law, saying that this protection was assumed. So the "establishment" of corporate personhood was done in a sort of left-handed way through a court clerk's wording in a decision on another matter. This is another of the critiques against corporate personhood.
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