The first amendment and commercial speech

Indiana Law Journal

Volumn 84, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 981-998

  Edwin Baker, C ^a,b  

^a Department of Law ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 68949113947     PISSN: 00196665     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (56)

1. 381 U.S. 301 (1965).
2. 316 U.S. 52 (1942).
3. Id. at 54.
4. See N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).
5. See THOMAS I. EMERSON, THE SYSTEM OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION (1970);
6. ALEXANDER MEKLEJOHN, FREE SPEECH AND ITS RELATION TO SELF-GOVERNMENT (1948), reprinted in POLITICAL FREEDOM 3 (1965).
7. See Martin H. Redish, The First Amendment in the Marketplace: Commercial Speech and the Values of Free Expression, 39 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 429 (1971).
8. See, e.g., C. EDWIN BAKER, HUMAN LIBERTY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH 6-25 (1989).
9. See Va. Bd. of Pharm, v. Va. Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976).
10. 447 U.S. 557 (1980).
11. See id. at 569-71.
12. See Lorillard Tobacco Co. v. Reilly, 533 U.S. 525 (2001).
13. See Central Hudson, 447 U.S. at 563-64;
14. of. Daniel Hays Lowenstein, "Too Much Puff": Persuasion, Paternalism, and Commercial Speech, 56 U. CIN. L. REV. 1205, 1238 (1988).
15. See Va. State Bd. of Pharm., 425 U.S. at 782-83 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
16. The one arguable exception to the claim in the text was a federal rule that prohibited (in the case of broadcasters in states that barred lotteries) the broadcast of information about lotteries. The law would appear to apply to a broadcast station, for example in its news program, from listing the winning numbers of the state lottery in a neighboring state. The Court, however, found the law inapplicable to this type of situation by interpreting it to apply only to advertisements, not news, about the lottery, thus following the distinction offered in the text above. United States v. Edge Broad. Co, 509 U.S. 418 (1993).
17. Lorillard Tobacco, 533 U.S. at 575 (Thomas, J., concurring).
18. See Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905),
19. overruled by W. Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).
20. See BAKER, supra note 7.
21. See generally MAX WEBER, ECONOMY AND SOCIETY (Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich eds., 1968).
22. 435 U.S. 765, 802 (1978) (White, J., dissenting).
23. Id. at 804-05.
24. 494 U.S. 652 (1990).
25. McConnell v. Fed. Elections Comm'n, 540 U.S. 93 (2003).
26. But of. Fed. Elections Comm'n v. Wis. Right to Life, 127 S. Ct. 2652 (2007).
27. See, e.g., 2 JÜRGEN HABERMAS, THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION: LIFEWORLD AND SYSTEM: A CRITIQUE OF FUNCTIONALIST REASON (Thomas McCarthy trans., 1987).
28. See Seana V. Shiffrin, Compelled Association, Morality, and Market Dynamics, 41 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 317 (2007).
29. See IMMANUEL KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON (Thomas Kingsmill Abbott trans, Dover Publ'ns 2004) (1788);
30. of. JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971).
31. 348 U.S. 483 (1955).
32. Va. State Bd. of Pharm, v. Va. Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748, 784 (1976) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (quoting Williamson, 348 U.S. at 490).
33. First Nat'l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, 823 (1978) (Rehnquist, J.,dissenting) (quoting Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 250, 303 (1819)).
34. See id. at 827-28.
35. Va. State Bd. of Pharm., 425 U.S. at 782 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (emphasis added).
36. Bellotti, 435 U.S. at 828 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
37. See Potter Stewart, Or of the Press, 26 HASTINGS L.J. 631 (1975).
38. See generally JÜRGEN HABERMAS, BETWEEN FACTS AND NORMS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCOURSE THEORY OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY (William Rehg trans, 1996);
39. JOHN RAWLS, POLITICAL LIBERALISM (1993).
40. I should note that the term "persuasion" here is actually somewhat distortive of the vast range of communicative uses of speech that receive constitutional protection, but at least in most cases, any harm or benefit that results from the protected speech involves the listener's mental assimilation and then her agreement, disagreement, appreciation, or other reaction to the message.
41. See, e.g., Vann v. State, 64 S.W. 243, 247 (Tex. 1900).
42. See C. Edwin Baker, Property and Its Relation to Constitutionally Protected Liberty, 134 U. PA. L. REV. 741, 742-74 (1986).
43. See Andrus v. Allard, 444 U.S. 51 (1979) (noting that there is no taking where the law allows a person to possess, give, or devise, but not to sell the artifact).
44. See EMERSON, supra note 5.
45. See JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY 163-87 (Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., Pelican Classics 1974) (1859).
46. STEVEN H. SHIFFRIN, DISSENT, INJUSTICE, AND THE MEANINGS OF AMERICA (1999);
47. STEVEN H. SHIFFRIN, THE FIRST AMENDMENT, DEMOCRACY, AND ROMANCE (1990).
48. Aspects of Thomas Emerson's fourth function of free speech, to create a balance between stability and change, are implicit in Shiffrin's discussion of dissent. See EMERSON, supra note 5.
49. Steven H. Shiffrin, The First Amendment and Economic Regulation: Away from a General Theory of the First Amendment' 78 Nw. U. L. REV. 1212, 1214 (1984).
50. See Shiffrin, supra note 24.
51. See C. Edwin Baker, Campaign Expenditures and Free Speech, 33 HARV. C.R.-CL. L. REV. 1 (1998).
52. See Geoffrey R. Stone & William P. Marshall, Brown v. Socialist Workers: Inequality as a Command of the First Amendment, 1983 SUP. CT. REV. 583.
53. Brown v. Socialist Workers '74 Campaign Comm. (Ohio), 459 U.S. 87 (1982).
54. A fifth theory might be that the First Amendment concerns only or primarily political or democracy-related speech. This argument could proceed in either of two ways. It might focus on the content of commercial speech, in which case both Redish's article and the Court in Virginia Board emphasized that the content of commercial advertising can be politically relevant. Alternatively, it might focus on the proper political enfranchisement of the speaker and the contexts in which she is oriented toward the public sphere. See Robert Post, The Constitutional Status of Commercial Speech, 48 UCLA L. REV. 1 (2000);
55. James Weinstein, Speech Categorization and the Limits of First Amendment Formalism: Lessons from Nike v. Kasky, 54 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 1091 (2004). Though this second approach would justify denying protection to commercial speech, I put it aside because I believe the rationale for protection of political speech lies in a conception of legitimate government that implies both democracy and limits on democracy as necessary consequences of a view of legitimate government as necessarily respecting individual liberty and equality-as Rawls put it, a view of people as "free and equal." RAWLS, supra note 25, at 13. This view makes protection of speech based on respect for individual autonomy more basic than protection of the subsumed category of political speech. This more expansive view of expressive freedom also, I believe, better describes speech doctrine and judicial results in the United States.0
56. MILL, supra note 39, at 164.