Are minors allowed to enter such contracts?
First Amendment, for kids: no freedom of speech if your entire family has been endangered by a for-profit company. Way to go, 'Merica.
Unfortunately, parents are legal guardians who do have the authority to enter into contracts on their children’s behalf.
The lifetime aspect, though…that seems harder to explain away, legally speaking.
While I’m not an attorney… I’m pretty sure that a parent cannot enter into a contract that will bind their child after their 18th birthday. And a child cannot sign a contact in the first place. I don’t think Range Resources has any ground to enforce the gag order on the children.
There are circumstances where they can. I’m not going to get into them here, because they’re not germane to the conversation, but I agree with you that in most cases parents lose their guardianship rights when the child hits 18.
But who will think of the corporations?
But corporations are people, and corporations that have been around for less than 18 years old can enter into binding contracts!
Actually, I’ve noticed that the contracts that corporations enter into are only as binding as your lawyers are good. So, there’s that difference too.
And for negotiating this agreement the family’s lawyers got $150,000.
Can anyone point to a circumstance of a positive use of a gag order?
Of course not, that would be a violation.
For corporations that say they have nothing to hide they sure act like corporations that have something to hide.
But who will think of the corporations?
If corporations aren’t people what are they, robots? Am I working for robot overlords and don’t even know it? Also as 40% owner of a corporation am I a robot? Mind = blown!
You own 40% of a corporation? That’s a pretty substantial holding, even in a “small” corporation. But yes, by the time you are at 40%, you’re no longer working for robot overlords…you ARE a robot overlord. Congratulations!
Corporations are by definition legal sociopaths. If they are people, they are people with no conscience and no motivation other than profit.
Well then color me a sociopath. I certainly didn’t bust my @$$ and risk my house by taking a second mortgage for seed money for fun or charity. I’m proud to say I did it for the profit and no other reason. Of course as a robot overlord I think the real sociopaths are the ones condemning profit considering profit is how money is made, ie wealth is created and why we don’t live in the stone age.
The problem is that a corporation has the rights of a person but not the responsibilities. For example, a corporation has the same Constitutional guarantee of free speech as a flesh-and-blood human being, but a corporation which breaks the law cannot be sent to prison for its crimes.
A corporation may be a “person” in a certain legal sense, but as a corporation is generally obligated to maximize profits for its shareholders without considering the ethical implications of its actions it’s not a stretch to say that “person” has the personality of a sociopath. This is not the same as claiming that the individual people of which a corporation is comprised are sociopaths.
A corporation is an association of individuals and when one or some of them break the law they certainly do go to jail. It would not make any sense to send every employee or even every owner to jail for the actions of some owners or employees.
And yes the goal of a corporation is to make money for the shareholders but any CEO that does this without regard to ethical implications is not a very good CEO and usually doesn’t do a very good job at the profit part either.
