From the NYT:
The claim that corporations have personal privacy rights met with widespread skepticism on Wednesday during a lively Supreme Court argument.
A year ago, the court ruled in the Citizens United decision that corporations and unions had a First Amendment right to spend money in candidate elections. But that decision, which involved a question of constitutional law, did not come up at the argument on Wednesday, which considered the quite different issue of what Congress meant when it exempted some files from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
The exemption at issue in the case, Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279, protects information that “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
AT&T invoked the exemption in seeking to block the release of documents it had provided to the F.C.C., which conducted an investigation into claims of overcharges by the company in a program to provide equipment and services to schools. The documents were sought by a trade association representing some of the company’s competitors.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, had ruled for the company, relying in part on a definition of “person” in the law that included corporations.
But several justices said it was too much of a leap to go from saying that corporations might be “persons” for some purposes to saying that their “personal privacy” could be invaded.
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