Commonwealth v. Bryant, S.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that a corporation or other collective entity may not resist a subpoena for its records on Fifth Amendment grounds
• holding that “artificial entities such as corporations may only act through their agents”
• holding that because corporations cannot assert a Fifth Amendment privilege, an officer of a corporation cannot avoid compliance with a subpoena issued upon the corporation even if compliance may incriminate him personally
• concluding that although Bellis did not focus on the testimonial aspect of the act of production, “such a focus would not have affected the results reached” because it is “well settled that no privilege can be claimed by the custodian of records.”
• stating that Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 26 S.Ct. 370, 50 L.Ed. 652 (1906) settled long ago that “a corporation has no Fifth Amendment privilege”
• observing that in the context of the application of the Fifth Amendment, a “corporate custodian” holds corporate or entity records “in a representative rather than a personal capacity”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).