Sunlight Where It's Needed : The Case for Freedom of Corporate Information

The article aims to challenge the premise according to which private corporations are free to do as they wish with the information at their disposal, that internal corporate information is "none of the public’s business", and that only narrowly tailored legislation can oblige them to report certain items of information to the public. On the policy level, the article presents widely accepted justifications for applying the principles of "freedom of information" on public agencies, and then turns to ask whether the same justifications are applicable to private corporations. The article then discusses whether applying a general duty of disclosure to corporations would constitute a breach of their "corporate rights" and, through a critical discussion of the notion of "corporate rights", finds the expected harm to be minimal. On the comparative level, the article presents several existing models that partially support the public’s right to receive information from private corporations. Through a review of laws and adjudications in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and South Africa, several such models are identified and analyzed to show why most of them accept the existing premise where secrecy is the rule and disclosure the exception, and why they fall short of meeting the challenges which corporate activity in the twenty-first century present to liberal democracies