In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission the Supreme Court established that corporations and unions have the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment. By rejecting the government’s compelling interest in prohibiting corporate electioneering communication, the Court ruled in favor of corporate use of treasury funds on indirect support of political candidates. This constitutional mandate of broadening corporate political speech rights beyond justifiable rational limits must be evaluated in full—a process still unfolding. The Court’s ruling proceeded along two predominant threads. In the first, the Court revived the corporate personhood doctrine in order to acquire a newer meaning of corporation replete with a broader assortment of rights than before. In the second, the Court granted a broader measure of political speech rights to corporations by invoking the First Amendment doctrine of the marketplace of ideas. While the opinion’s prudence has already been the subjectofmultipleinquiries, mycurrentanalysisfocusesontwodistinct areas. First, I examine whether the majority’s advancement of a corporate personhood doctrine is necessarily a prudent constitutional methodology for expanding corporate speech rights. Second, I shed revelatory light on the novel approach the Court has undertaken in embracing the marketplace of ideas doctrine for broadening the scope of corporate political speech. Posterity will indeed decide whether or not Citizens United was wrongly decided on both of these grounds. However, in its quest for corporate speech rights expansion, the Court might have engaged in incoherent jurisprudence. Therefore, this article examines the Citizens United Court’s trajectory along the First Amendment jurisprudence to its rationale for seeking a new corpus in American corporate law. Read More …
