New Rules Project - Governance - Corporate Personhood Ordinances

Coporate Personhood Ordinances

The Corporate Personhood Ordinances were developed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in partnership with the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD) and communities across Pennsylvania impacted by land applied sewage sludge and corporate factory farms. Below find a brief overview and link to the full text of the ordinance. For more background, see a full description and discussion of the ordinance's enactment and challenges faced by the township here

On the evening of December 9, 2002, the elected municipal officials of Porter Township, Clarion County - a municipality of 1,500 residents an hour north of Pittsburgh in Northwestern Pennsylvania - became the first local government in the United States to eliminate corporate claims to civil and constitutional privileges. The Township adopted a binding law declaring that corporations operating in the Township may not wield legal privileges - historically used by corporations to override democratic decisionmaking - to stop the Township from passing laws which protect residents from toxic sewage sludge.

The actions by Porter Township thus repudiate the history of state and federal public officials restricting the rights of citizens while expanding the rights of corporations and their owners.

In addition to the legislative and judicial responses to the assertion of local democracy by communities, sludge corporations have also instructed the state environmental regulatory agency and corporate farm lobbies to intervene with Clarion County Townships. In late 2002, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau met with Clarion County Townships to convince them to repeal their local laws. The four Clarion County Townships that have adopted the law refused. Instead, Porter Township forged ahead with adopting the most recent law, which eliminates corporate interference in the democratic processes of the Township.

The actions of Porter Township - along with the actions of other municipal governments in Pennsylvania dealing with land applied sewage sludge and factory farms - evidence a shift of communities away from permitting corporate harms to asserting direct control over corporations.

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