Article a Corporate Right to Privacy
POLLMAN_4fmt 11/6/2014 3:54 PM Article A Corporate Right to Privacy Elizabeth Pollman† Do corporations have a constitutional right to privacy? Could a corporation claim a constitutional right to the nondis- closure of its information, as AT&T might have argued in its recent Freedom of Information Act case? Might a corporation have a privacy claim if the Securities and Exchange Commis- sion required it to disclose health information about its CEO, as Apple resisted disclosing information about Steve Jobs’s declin- ing health? Does the ACLU have a right to privacy that is vio- lated by the government’s mass collection and surveillance of its phone call metadata? Should corporations have such a right to privacy? The Supreme Court has never squarely answered the cor- porate right to privacy question. A 1950 case, United States v. Morton Salt Co., has been cited for the proposition that corpo- rations have no constitutional right to privacy, but that was not the holding of the case, which notably predated the Court’s dec- laration of a constitutional right to privacy.1 More recently in † Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. For help- ful comments and conversations, I thank Kelli Alces, Aditi Bagchi, Will Baude, Margaret Blair, Sam Bray, Ryan Calo, Nathan Chapman, Beth Colgan, Wendy Couture, Dick Craswell, Diane Lourdes Dick, Michael Dorff, Jared Ellias, Mi- chael Guttentag, Michelle Harner, Joan Heminway, Paddy Ireland, Kate Judge, Mark Kelman, Kathleen Kim, Michael Klausner, Kevin Lapp, Jessica Levinson, Justin Levitt, Kaipo Matsumura, Ben Means, Sasha Natapoff, James Nelson, Priscilla Ocen, Dale Oesterle, Stefan Padfield, Terrill Pollman, Victoria Schwartz, Shirin Sinnar, Judy Stinson, Marcy Strauss, Anne Tucker, Michael Waterstone, and Adam Zimmerman.
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