Article 10: Right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal
Helpful
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Two separate corporate practices touch this right without controlling it. First, when companies write mandatory arbitration into employment and consumer contracts, they move disputes out of open court into private proceedings. The arbitrator is one the company itself selects and often repeatedly pays. That cuts against both the public and the independent parts of this article. Second, in the roughly two-thirds of U.S. states that elect some judges, business groups, led nationally by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have poured money into judicial campaigns; a national study of high-spending states found courts ruled for corporate parties 71 percent of the time. Neither practice determines whether courts as an institution are fair or independent, which remains chiefly a matter of public funding, appointment design, and the rule of law.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Forced arbitration clauses move disputes out of public courtrooms and into private, company-selected arbitrators. But the fairness and independence of the actual court and tribunal system is set and financed almost entirely by governments, not companies. That covers judicial staffing, funding, procedure, and appointment or election methods.
Business-aligned spending in state judicial elections is real and documented to correlate with pro-corporate rulings. But only a minority of the world's judiciaries are elected at all. Where they are, corporate money is one of several forces (partisan spending, media, redistricting of court seats) rather than the deciding obstacle to independence.
1 and 1, higher of the two, gives Helpful
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Big Business Taking over State Supreme Courts, Center for American Progress, 2012
- Mandatory Arbitration Shareholder Proposal Goes to Court, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2019-04-01
- The growing use of mandatory arbitration: Access to the courts is now barred for more than 60 million American workers, Economic Policy Institute, 2018-04-06
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Its preferred candidates won 21 of 24 state supreme court elections from 2001 to 2003 and it spent over $1 million in Ohio's 2006 high court races, per a Center for American Progress analysis of corporate spending in judicial elections.
Big Business Taking over State Supreme Courts, Center for American Progress
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.