However, before oral argument took place, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite announced: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."[3] This quotation was printed by the court reporter in the syllabus and case history above the opinion, but was not in the opinion itself. As such, it did not have any legal precedential value.[4] Nonetheless, the persuasive value of Waite's essentially ultra vires statement did influence later courts, becoming part of American corporate law without ever actually being enacted by statute or formal judicial decision.[5] For these reasons, it is literally an unprecedented extension of constitutional rights to US corporations.[6]