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Corporate Free Speech Case Lands at High Court
The case before the high court
involves sneaker-maker Nike Inc. and what the company
says are unfounded allegations that workers who make Nike
products in overseas plants were mistreated and that the
company lied about it, according to an Associated Press
report.
The case arises from Nike’s
campaign to defend wages, treatment of workers and health
and safety conditions at Asian plants, run by
subcontractors, where workers make tennis shoes and
athletic wear. San Francisco activist Marc Kasky sued
Nike, alleging that the company lied about how much the
employees earned and how they were treated.
Nike and companies that back it contend they have full free speech protection when responding to such allegations. Critics argue that companies that mislead the public while trying to sell products should not be protected.
Oregon-based Nike hired a
high-powered legal team for the Supreme Court case
including Harvard professor Laurence Tribe and former US
Solicitor General Walter Dellinger. Tribe said that under
the California decision, companies cannot respond to
critics.
“There is a Draconian scheme in
which one side is virtually unfettered in what it can say
that is critical of the business, and the other side is
shackled,” Tribe told the AP. “The ultimate loser is the
public.”
Nike Opponents: Hold Companies
Accountable
Alan Caplan, one of Kasky’s
lawyer, told the AP that companies need to be held
accountable for what they say when trying to sell
products. If they aren’t, he said they could falsely
claim that their products were made in the United States
or that workers were treated well.
Caplan said Nike put false
statements about its labor practices in a pamphlet
distributed to reporters, in press releases, on the
Internet, in letters to organizations, and in a letter to
the editor — all efforts to sell products. “The public
wants to be told the truth,” he said
For more than two decades the
Supreme Court has struggled to define commercial speech,
which gets less protection than other types of speech like
political expression. A coalition of companies, public
relations executives and newspapers and television stations
had urged the court to clarify the standard.
In fact, s
ome 30 news organizations, including
ABC, CBS, NBC and top newspaper chains, have sided with
Nike and argued in court filings that reporters will not be
able to get company executives to talk freely about the
safety of products, racial discrimination or environmental
concerns about their industry, because of the fear of the
lawsuits, the AP story said.
The result will be “inhibiting the
media’s ability to compare both viewpoints in order to
ferret out the truth,” the groups said in Court
filings.
In commercial speech cases, there is no First Amendment protection if it can be proven that information was false or misleading. In other types of free speech cases, people who file suit must prove either negligence or actual malice.
The case is Nike Inc. v. Kasky,
02-575.