 Extraterritoriality, How far does it go? |
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 Nov 29 2003, 02:15 AM
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#26
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Shooting Target  Group: Members Posts: 1,685 Joined: 17-August 02 Member No.: 3,123  |
They don't create laws, but they create precedent for how the courts will enforce the laws. If they say that they're going to stop enforcing laws unless certain conditions are met (a miranda reading, a free lawyer, etc.), then that's just what happens. Also note that neither a miranda reading nor a free lawyer are included in the Constitution; the Supreme Court isn't just for debating the Constitution.
And Congress can't "simply" pass an amendment, doing that is a Big Fucking Deal. :) |
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Nov 29 2003, 02:16 AM
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#27
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Immortal Elf Group: Validating Posts: 7,999 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 1,890 |
So is allowing anyone with enough cash to buy off your soverign land and do whatever they like on it, but that didn't seem to stop them. :P
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Nov 29 2003, 02:23 AM
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#28
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Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,685 Joined: 17-August 02 Member No.: 3,123 |
I meant a red tape Big Fucking Deal, not a consequences Big Fucking Deal. ;)
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Nov 29 2003, 02:52 AM
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#29
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Immortal Elf Group: Validating Posts: 7,999 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 1,890 |
I didn't say it wouldn't be. But the moment a single corporation did something or was involved in something ghastly (don't even get me started on the whole Arcology Shutdown) that would show the folly of that stupid, stupid, STUPID decision, Congress would easily get their asses in gear. No one likes to lose power... especially that much power. As if letting the NAN take and keep their territory wasn't bad enough. :D
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Nov 29 2003, 03:29 AM
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#30
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Target Group: Members Posts: 71 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 1,832 |
Okay, expanding on that (and asking more than saying:) So, there was some situation where USA didn't want any person to just have a nuclear plant in their back yard, but there may just not be any law directly saying "No private party may possess a nuclear reactor," so the US-Supreme said that corps are Extraterritorial, so that they COULD make that designation, but wouldn't piss off corporations. Maybe? |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Nov 29 2003, 03:48 AM
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#31
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Guests |
This decision has legitimized a legal fiction literally on the magnitude of the Discovery Doctrine. There is no legal precedent to allow corporations to exercise what is in effect the granting of complete sovereignty over their property. I mean, this isn't an interpretation of the Constitution like read the rights of the accused "to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense" (U.S. Const. Amend. VI) means that the government has to provide a public defender to someone who can't afford an attorney. This is a straight-up legal fiction pulled out of thin fucking air. However, let me take a stab at it.
Granted, corporations are allowed to do things that the government can't because of due process (e.g. summarily firing someone without cause). Private entities are also considered state actors for the purposes of exercising traditional, exclusive state functions. Now, take the context of the Court in 2001 (as I mentioned in a previous post). It was filled with a remarkable number of conservatives, with a Bork-like Chief Justice (according the the timeline Rehnquist a) never filled the CJ spot in '86, and b) retired in the early '90s) and the U.S. government wasn't helping the case with the wholesale sell-off of entities that had once-filled traditional, exclusive state roles (namely, the USPS-- which could have been, but was not per se, unconstitutional). While Rehnquist will go down in history as the king of "state action," CJ Tyrell and crew seem to have upped the ante in Shiawase by essentially declaring that there is no such thing as "traditional, exclusive" state action anymore. Why not? Well, private prisons are considered state actors because there have historically been private jails and thus they aren't the exclusive purview of the state, and DP doesn't apply. The same can be said (and probably was) about armed paramilitary security in Seretech. Taking the Seretech decision one step further, and building on the history of power companies being sufficiently private actors in spite of their nature as regulated monopolies it is a small step to allow Shiawase to construct a nuclear power plant for its own private purposes beyond the interference of the NRC. Likewise, the granting of extraterritoriality would probably be rooted a great deal in historical precedent (and this goes into a situation where SCOTUS has begun to cite to foreign jurisprudence) where historically corporations have in the past been allowed extraterritorial authority to operate in the state's stead (e.g. British colonial corps in America and India; extraterritoriality in China preceding the Boxer Rebellion). Given that the state (Britain) would be the sovereign over the land in question (enter the Discovery Doctrine), then by granting such extensive authority, there would be a case for corporations to exercise extraterritorial power domestically. And while the corporations of such a size that they could exercise extraterritoriality are chartered in a state and are not only engaged in interstate commerce, but international commerce the federal government's role in interstate and foreign commerce can be (and in this case, was) read narrowly in Art. I to ensure the free flow of commerce (Holmes' "stream of commerce") and protect interference by the states. Likewise the historical precedents in which a corporation is given immunity from liability (e.g., the debate regarding the MTBE immunity in the federal Energy bill) and the theory of sovereign immunity (which most states abolished at common law only to have it enacted as statute) could allow for corporations to be granted virtually complete immunity from all liability on their property if they are acting as an effective sovereign on said property. However, this requires a giant stretch to put all of the pieces together to get a result so remarkable as the Shiawase decision (IIRC, it was not only based on precedents similar to Seretech, but it produced years of litigation and clarification) out of SCOTUS, and especially one which is supposedly conservative (ie. strict constructionist) but yet would stretch so far beyond the words of the Constitution to allow the effective creation of sovereigns in the U.S. That said, the fact that it was a 120+ page decision is telling, but not shocking. I'm reading a 96-page state supreme court decision in my spare time which reads like a textbook on civil procedures and evidence (and what NOT to do), but that is also the biggest case in state history. For a case like this, 120 pages indicates that this case was a living, breathing monster (and should have taken at least a decade just to get to the point where SCOTUS would hear it). If anything, I think that putting it at 2001 given its history (I believe it began around 95-96) is too early (especially given the technical facts involved in the case), but it also reeks of such liberal construction to shock the conscience, and I wonder how much thinking went into this given that it is a foundational fact for which the entire SR universe rests upon. |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Nov 29 2003, 03:55 AM
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#32
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Well, there are a great number of private entities which have built and operate nulcear power plants and I'm sure that the NRC could figure out a way to deny them a license without violating their due process (even though the corps can violate its users due process rights). This was also probably a successful attack on the federal government's authority to regulate nulcear energy (which explains why in my world, Shiwase Atomics HQ in DeeCee is in the former DoE HQ). |
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Nov 29 2003, 01:34 PM
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#33
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Runner Group: Members Posts: 3,314 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Lisbon, Cidade do Pecado Member No.: 185 |
Although I agree with what you're saying to a point (ie. I too think the SCOTUS decision is placed way too early chronologically both in terms of the general state of affairs and megacorp influence - which only really comes into its own in the late Twenties) there is one point which people are overlooking. The SR timeline branches from our own in the mid-Nineties. The context of the Seretech Decision is based on a US where there are food riots in the US in 1998! The general state of the nation is completely different from today's (for the worse). The government is far more desperate and the corps have far more power and influence. Hence the Resource Rush and the trigger events for SAIM. And while the RIAA has little pull with Congress and might not be setting precendents there are already precedents against anti-trust/monopoly and armed corporate security in the US, Canada and the EU that should make constitutional pundits blush. In the US most of these are currently in the energy and oil fields but it is spreading into a number of other utilities and basics service sectores like health and prison management. The legal context and precedent however remains conditioned by the political and economical context and that is exactly where the Shadowrun timeline is differs.
You are correct. I misread Wobbly's "Omnidome Theatre" example (thought it was a subsidiary rather than part of the mother corp), although Chromed Accountant's "Corporate Divisions" comments suggest that subsidiaries are considered an integral part of the mother corp which would in turn suggests that the rights of said corp extend to its component elements. I'll dig out my Corp Shadowfiles tonight and check through that.
Actually it was "[...]over the next ten years, similar rulings were made in most other First World countries[...], however these were just rulings, legislation and pratical scenarios would have to follow and in fact in those early days "[...] At first the Shiawase Decision only applied extraterritoriality to certain corporate sites under conditions set down by the Supreme Court", this would change with time as "[...]a large number of restrictions have since been nibbled away by corp-sponsored decisions". What I was trying to say was that it wasn't an all or nothing decision. It was a gradual process. It began as something far more limited and evolved into the standard of extraterritoriality we all know and hate over a long period of time. That standard is what took 40 years to pass into law in the form of the BRA. |
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Nov 29 2003, 02:28 PM
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#34
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Incertum est quo loco te mors expectet; Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 6,546 Joined: 24-October 03 From: DeeCee, U.S. Member No.: 5,760 |
I'd argue they branch before that, although the PUBLISH timeline splits off then. The first book I *BELIEVE* came out in 1988? So the people at the time were looking at a timeline with 15 more years before now and then. Its heavily based off of cyberpunk which came out before that. In a lot of ways we've gone the oppositte direction from SR. If we pretend that, starting 1988, corporations continue to get larger and less state controlled, that the state continues making public sector industries private and that things like the cold war and post cold war political situation always kept countries busy with pissing matches rather than watching themselves, its a different story. I like Crimsondude's explanation a lot, it sounds very official. If I'm reading it right, the decision was just a further blurring of whats public and private, giving some private public protections and powers. |
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Nov 29 2003, 10:16 PM
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#35
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
[nitpick]1989![/nitpick] :) |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Nov 29 2003, 10:20 PM
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#36
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Guests |
Actually I'd argue that it diverged as early as 1986. In the SR timeline, CJ Burger didn't retire until the early 90s. It was his Real Life retirement in 1986 that led to Rehnquist's appointment as Chief Justice, and the appointment of Antonin Scalia to fill his seat as an Associate Justice. Without that, it allows for a huge distinction to be made between the real Court today (which has had the same composition since 1993) and the one in SR in 2001 because sthe majority of the sitting Justices IRL (Stevens, Rehnquist, Scalia, Clinton's two appointees - Ginsburg and Breyer, and possibly Geo. H.W. Bush's two appointees - Souter and Thomas) wouldn't have been on the Court that decided Seretech and Shiawase. The composition change which IRL took about seven years (1986-93) took about one year in SR, and it was all under one President's watch instead of three IRL. Given that SR1 was released in 1989, I'd say that it's fair to assume that it should be the bare minimum of where the timelines diverge. And maybe sooner since SR was being developed around the same time as CP2020, which came out before SR1 did.
I agree with you 100% I also tried to preface it with a clear recognition that the political events in the 1980s and 90s in Shadowrun were completely different than they were in reality. Aside from the sell-off context (selling AMTRAK, USPS, etc.) we should step back and look at another fact--Whether anyone agrees that Reaganomics worked IRL, Shadowrun, it clearly failed miserably. The economy in the 80s and 90s still sucked. There was no late 80s boom, and the early 90s recession was in effect a blip in the bigger picture of SR economics. But the economy never picked up in the mid-90s or late 90s. It got worse. The U.S. government never cut deficit spending and we never had a balanced budget. Instead, the FedGov began selling off parts of itself to corps for revenue (I don't imagine the rest of the world was doing much better). Then the Teamsters strike in New York, which caused the food riots which eventually led to Seretech. One of the interesting things is that in the CorpSec Handbook, there is a reference to the Antiterrotist Act of 1996/7. The real one was in 1996, and the context of what led to that Act (terrorism (obviously), and the increasing militarization of corporate security according CSH) doesn't paint a rosy picture of America in the Shadowrun 90s because the vision was basically of the dark days of the early 80s when crime and unemployment were up and the economy looked like another depression was en route (see also, The 1970s), and OBTW, the Japanese were buying up every f'ing thing they could get their hands on. I can easily see the corps creating enclaves and corporate cities--which still exist, BTW in these troubled times. I believe it was Corp Shadowfiles which mentioned Disney's city in Florida. And then, in the midst of all of this arise the legal facts which led to the Shiawase decision. I can easily see Congress having given the corps certain privileges and immunities to facilitate the purchase of the various government agencies (e.g. complete immunity from liability to whoever bought AMTRAK). After all, this is a Congress which a year later created the legal conditions to initiate the Resource Rush, and effectively subverted its own sovereignty over government and tribal lands to the corporations. The political conditions are there to allow the creation of extraterritorial enclaves. I just find it hard to believe that it's rooted in a Constitutional right beyond the scope of Congress to change. It should have been a political decision for Congress to grant, and not the Supreme Court. |
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