Secret court proceedings, corporations hiding behind aliases, special legal rights for Big Business

 Unlike a Supreme Court case such as Citizens United, there isn’t a lot of attention on this case.
There’s just Public Citizen doing what we’ve done for 42 years and counting.

Following the Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United ruling, this is another crushing step in the corporate march to power that we push back against every day at Public Citizen.

1. After a child was injured, a report was submitted to the Consumer Product Safety Commission through a database (that Public Citizen helped establish) for sharing information about potentially dangerous products.

2. The company that makes the product sued to have the report removed from the database.

3. Even though the company initiated the lawsuit, it was worried that unflattering information about it could come to light during the case, so it asked to be allowed to hide behind an alias and for the case to be conducted in complete secrecy.

4. The judge granted the company’s request, permitting it to be known only as “Company Doe."

5. The case lasted nine months, all of it with no public input or oversight.

6. The final decision wasn’t made public until three months after the case ended, and even then the judge’s ruling, which permanently blocked the report from appearing in the database, had key portions blacked out — including the name of the company and the product, the names of witnesses, and the facts on which the judge relied.

W E . W I L L . N O T . A L L O W . corporations to secure the right to litigate in secret and thwart the American people’s ability to hold corporate power accountable.

Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen
https://secure.citizen.org/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=8201&track=w14idCmpnyDoe1...