This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.
...in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit ... held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Royal Dutch Shell and against the plaintiffs, multinational corporations — particularly in mining and other extractive industries — could draw the lesson that it is now safer to forge alliances with autocratic regimes that have poor human rights records because they will not be judged culpable in the way individuals can be.
This leaves the Supreme Court with an extraordinary choice to make, in juxtaposition to its previous ruling in Citizens United: whether to accept an argument that, in effect, leaves corporations less culpable than individuals are for human rights violations committed abroad — or whether to hold that if a 200-year-old law can be used to hold individual violators to account, it can be used against corporate violators as well.
I do not think this will end well.
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But, as Mr. Weiss points out, a ruling in favor of Royal Dutch
would set up a paradox: corporations are persons, except they aren't. A ruling in favor of Royal Dutch could be used to challenge the Citizens United ruling, on the grounds that the Court must decide once and for all whether corporations are considered persons, in every respect.
Personhood is not a sometimes thing. The Court can either take its Citizens United ruling to a logical conclusion, or it can set itself up to admit it made a mistake in that case. It's corporate powers that don't have a good outcome in this case.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Never underestimate the ability of Centrists & conservatives
Never underestimate the ability of Centrists & conservatives to engage themselves in doublethink.
I hear what you are saying, but that rationale assumes a healthy degree of intellectual honesty that does not exist on the SCOTUS. I think the likelihood of them admitting a mistake is rather low.
I do hope you're right, though.
Either outcome could lead to something favorable.
If the court rules that Royal Dutch can be held accountable under this law, it means that corporations, in their legal status as persons, can be held guilty under every law a person can be held guilty for. This could mean, for a creative judge, that they could be punished like regular persons.
I'm waiting for the day some judge finds a corporation guilty of murder and sentences it to death. Or life in prison. It's like in Disney's Aladdin when Aladdin tricks Jafar into wishing that he was a genie.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness