| See, that sort of thing strikes me as hairy. Apologies for the quick tangent but... It's interesting. As far as I'm aware, there is a lot you can get away with not saying, as the courts are specifically not huge fans of compelled speech. Each form of compelled speech that I'm aware of tends to arise from the authority of an administrative regulator. I.e. FDA compelling ingredient labels, side-effects, Office of the Surgeon General for alcohol and tobacco/nicotine warnings, FTC/CFPB for product/financial product marketing/disclaimers, Bureau of Labor postings in the workplace etc. With regards to specific things like child labor/conflict minerals, etc..., the issue shouldn't have to come up in theory, because you shouldn't be doing it period, and any evidence that you are is prosecutable without having to indirectly assert it was a case of securities fraud. It's also not illegal to be daft or misleading until it crosses the line into fraud, where a material reliance on the veracity or falsehood of the information can be demonstrated. That doesn't mean that there aren't grey area cases, or that everyone does their due diligence, but in general, this is the way things have always worked for as long as I've been around. My 2 cents. |
Obviously Exxon and others went further and attempted to discredit the evidence that what they were doing could be wrong, but if they'd just done the research into the climate impacts, and just never published it, would that have been fraudulent? To just pretend they didn't know what they were doing was immoral/unethical? That seems like the sort of things plenty of companies do all the time, to varying degrees of moral and ethical fault.