janelane wrote:

AT&T can no longer feel his hands and feet.

AT&T is people! AT&T is people!

-janelane, post-apocalyptic fan

I don't really agree with the left's campaign against the concept of corporate personhood. The idea, unless I don't understand it, is that corporations don't have rights, only people do. For example, the thinking goes that corporations don't have the right to freedom of speech. Nike doesn't have the right to freedom of speech, for example, so its OK to regulate anything Nike publishes.

But every newspaper in the United States is a corporation. Do newspapers not have a right to freedom of the press? In 10 years of arguments over corporate personhood I have not heard any articulate explanation of how the left's view can be reconciled with freedom of the press in the context of newspapers.

What about freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures? Is it OK for the government to raid the offices of Nike without a warrant? What about non-profit political organizations? Every non-profit political organization is a corporation. Can their offices be raided without warrants?

What if their offices were raided, and their trade secrets, client lists, internal email discussions, and other confidential information were collected by the police. Would it be reasonable for the police to publish all of that information on the open internet based on an FOIA request?

That seems to be what is an issue in this case, and it seems to be that AT&T has a right to privacy regarding this sort of information regardless of whether or not they are a "person."

Decius wrote:
I don't really agree with the left's campaign against the concept of corporate personhood.

So government contractors don't have a right to privacy but corporations do?

In the hearing (and, by extension, the Slate article), the AT&T lawyer raises your point on raiding nonprofit offices. The justices point out that the law is already rife with corporate protections, and qualifying a corporation as a person crosses a philosophical boundary to which I'm inclined to agree.

Ginsburg observes that "overwhelmingly, personal is used to describe an individual, not an artificial being," and so Klineberg offers up another scenario in which corporate privacy could be violated by a narrow reading of "personal privacy." Imagine, he says, a FOIA request seeking "internal documents within, say, an environmental nonprofit organization talking about their political strategies."

Justice Stephen Breyer asks whether Klineberg has any examples of this ever happening in the past 35 years. When Klineberg can't think of one, Breyer suggests that "[m]aybe one reason this has really never been a problem is because all … these organizations that have interests in privacy are actually taken care of by the other 17 exemptions here." And Scalia adds for good measure: "Another reason might [be] that nobody ever thought that personal privacy would cover this."

-janelane, not a lawyer and admitted telecomm hater

janelane wrote:
So government contractors don't have a right to privacy but corporations do?

I'm not sure where I sit on that one. On the one hand, the government might require contractors to get security clearances. Once you allow that you've got to allow all kinds of things that are less then that. The requirement in question is totally egregious but I'm not convinced that it rises to a constitutional issue. The lawsuit was a bit of a hail merry because the employer was unwilling to bend on what was simply bad policy. If you don't like their requirements, you have the option of not working there. If might be different if they were a captive audience, but they aren't. They are accepting money.

I could be convinced otherwise. I don't agree with the conservatives that its clear that there is absolutely no constitutional right to informational privacy. The conservative notion that all constitutional rights are explicitly stated is in total conflict with the text of the constitution, the history of the constitution and of the notion of constitutionality in English common law. Its rather bizarre that we have justices that think that and even more bizarre that they claim to base their perspective on history.

But there are a lot of requirements that employers can impose on potential employees and while some requirements are restricted by statute, few are restricted by the Constitution.

Its not as if I'm saying that government contractors have no right to privacy. Information that the government collected about them pursuant to their employment contract should not be made available to anyone who wants to file a FOIA request. Thats a separate issue (and one that seems to have been raised by the justices in reference to the privacy act).

The issue regarding the personhood of corporations is complicated. Corporations are obviously not persons in a semantic sense. I think that rights apply to the actions of corporations. The freedom of the press applies to corporations. Thats enough for me to reject the philosophical notion that corporations cannot have rights. If corporations must be people to have the right to freedom of the press, then clearly they must be people.