Question

Read the following passage regarding the historical debate over corporate personhood in American law:

In analyzing the historical development of corporate personhood, scholars frequently point to the late nineteenth century as a pivotal era. During this period, traditional legal formalists maintained that the corporation was purely an artificial creation of the state—a 'concession' whose rights were strictly limited to those explicitly enumerated in its state-issued charter. Consequently, they resisted applying the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to corporate entities. By contrast, a rising group of corporate realists argued that corporations were not mere legal fictions but organic social realities existing independently of state creation, thus naturally qualifying for the same constitutional protections as human citizens.

Modern critics often condemn this era's jurisprudence as a wholesale abandonment of the Fourteenth Amendment's original purpose, which they contend was exclusively to secure the rights of emancipated individuals following the Civil War. However, this critical perspective overlooks the nuanced legal mechanics of the time. The most compelling historical interpretation suggests that the courts did not actually embrace the realists' 'natural entity' theory. Instead, they implicitly adopted an aggregate theory. Under this view, constitutional protections were extended to corporations not because the corporate entity itself possessed inherent natural rights, but rather because doing so was deemed necessary to protect the underlying property rights of the natural persons—the shareholders—who comprised it.

Based on the passage, match each group or individual to the core assertion that accurately represents their perspective.