Back in college, I played a lot of Shadowrun. Shadowrun was a roleplaying game with a cyberpunk setting infused with elements of fantasy and magic, and endured more than its share of derision. It didn't matter to me. I like mash-ups of all kinds.
What brings this to mind is this past week's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Unlike many roleplaying games, Shadowrun had an unusually detailed history for its campaign setting, charting how the world had gotten from the early 1990s we all knew to the magic-infused, technology-mad, corporate-dominated milieu of 2050. A key element of the game was the extraterritorialityof corporations. In the game history, the foundation for corporate extraterritoriality was laid by two fictional court rulings.
The first ruling was Seretech v. United States. In the game background, this followed an incident in which a truckers' strike cut off much of New York City's food supply, and shortages were rampant. A mob besieged a truck that they believed to be carrying food but that was actually carrying infectious medical waste, and the transport company employed private security personnel to hold off the mob. The clash turned into a battle and even crossed state lines, with the mob pursuing the truck to New Jersey and storming a company facility. Twenty employees and 200 rioters died in the fighting. When the company was convicted of criminal negligence, it appealed and won Supreme Court recognition of a private corporation's right to maintain and use an armed security force to protect its own personnel and property.
If Citizens United is the case guaranteeing corporations the right to free speech, Seretech would have been the case guaranteeing them the right to bear arms.
In the game background, corporate lawyers, using Seretech as precedent, began to assert more rights over the government, leading to the second watershed case, Shiawase Corporation v. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Prior to this case, Shiawase had sought permission to build its own nuclear plant to power its metal refining and manufacturing operations, independent of the regional power grid, in order to reduce expenses. The NRC had denied the request, but Shiawase had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which had reversed it, accepting Shiawase's argument that the government was restraining trade and injuring Shiawase by charging high energy rates and not allowing it to obtain energy from cheaper sources.
After the nuclear plant was built, it was targeted by a team of eco-terrorists intent on blowing it up, with the materials necessary to do so. The saboteurs breached the company's outer security perimeter but were killed by security personnel on company before reaching the reactor. The NRC prosecuted Shiawase for criminal negligence and reckless endangerment. The company audaciously argued that it could have defended against a much larger group but that NRC regulations had prevented it from implementing more effective security measures in the first place! In conclusion, Shiawase argued, the only way to reconcile the company's right to security with the laws of the United States was to exempt the company from the laws of the United States.
And the Supreme Cought bought it. In the landmark Shiawase ruling, the Supreme Court held that Shiawase and all other corporations had extraterritorial status, and therefore corporate property was sovereign and not subject to the jurisdiction of the surrounding nation-state. Step onto corporate property, step out of the United States . . . and out from under its protections. All of them.
Far-fetched? Yeah, a little bit. But less so after Citizens United. And Shadowrun did more or less predict the coming of the debit card and the Blackberry. If there's a lesson here, I think it's this: As bad as the Citizens United ruling is, we can't let ourselves stop asking what sorts of rulings might come next because of it.