JusticeDept.com

A Pennsylvania Judge has ruled that corporations are not entitled to the same right of privacy as people. The case involved the fracking industry.

Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca said, “Whether a right of privacy for businesses exists within the prenumbral rights of Pennsylvania’s constitution is a matter of first impression. It does not.”

“This court ruling is a significant development for the growing movement to restore democracy to the people,” said John Bonifaz, executive director of Free Speech For People. “The ruling is the newest example of dissent within the judiciary to the fabricated doctrine of corporate constitutional rights. It will be held up for years to come as a powerful defense of the promise of American self-government: of, by, and for the people.”

The Court wrote, “Nothing in that jurisprudence (Pennsylvania constitution) indicates that that right [of privacy] is available to business entities. There are no men or woman defendants in the instant case; they are various business entities. Business entities are created by the state and subject to laws, unlike people with natural rights. In the absence of state law, business entities are nothing. If businesses had natural rights like people, the chattel would become the co-equal to its owners, the servant on par with its masters, the agent the peer of its principles, and the legal fabrication superior to the law that created and sustains it.”

The court’s ruling was prompted by a lawsuit filed by several newspapers and resulted in the unsealing of a confidential settlement where fracking companies “paid $750,000 to a family that claimed the gas drilling had contaminated their water and harmed their health.”