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Banning Corporations' Civil Rights
Arthur Stamoulis
 On
December 9, 2002, the small, northwestern Pennsylvania community of
Porter Township made history by becoming the first local government
in the nation to strip corporations of the civil and constitutional
rights typically granted to citizens.
Arguing that, "only citizens should be able to participate in the
democratic process… and to enjoy a republican form of government,"
municipal officials passed the "Corporate Personhood Elimination and
Democracy Protection Ordinance."
This legally-binding law was passed after Alcosan Corporation, a sewage
sludge hauling operation, threatened to sue Porter Township in order to
overturn the Township's law requiring "tipping fees" from any company
wishing to apply sludge to land in the community.
Porter Township uses these fees to conduct safety tests on each
individual batch of sludge prior to allowing their application.
Currently, Pennsylvania state law only requires sludge haulers to
conduct quarterly tests on their sewage materials, not testing on a
batch-by-batch basis. Township officials see their more stringent
requirements as useful in protecting the health and well being of
the Township's residents and its environment.
In recent years, another sludge hauling corporation sued another
township in Centre County, Pennsylvania, claiming that that
township's tipping fee law violated the corporation's civil and
constitutional rights. In the past, federal courts have granted
corporations the same rights as human beings. The "Corporate
Personhood Elimination and Democracy Protection Ordinance" was
passed in part in order to prevent, or at least protest,
a similar ruling over Porter Township's tipping fee law.
The Township's new corporate personhood law bluntly states,
"The specific purpose of this Ordinance is to eliminate the
purported constitutional rights of corporations in order to
remedy the harms that corporations cause to the people of
Porter Township by exercise of such rights."
Some critics of this law have pointed out that it stands
in fairly clear opposition to rulings made by the US Supreme
Court as to the rights of corporations. Paul Cienfuegos,
Director of Democracy Unlimited and an expert in corporate
personhood, compares Porter Township's ordinance with state
laws in California and other states that legalize medicinal
marijuana in the face of federal laws against it. Cienfuegos
argues that these types of laws create, "an effective 'crisis
of jurisdiction' that pits state government against federal
government," in a way that may eventually let local people
determine their own policies.
Porter Township's corporate personhood law was developed with
help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and
the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy.
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