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The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States on corporate speech regulation has evolved to distinguish markedly what once appeared a more expansive precedent in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. This article considers the manner in which a doctrine of corporate speech regulation has been fashioned in the case law that derives from the special nature of the corporate form and justifies regulation of corporate political spending in candidate elections in order to address the potential for real or apparent corruption of democratic processes. That line of jurisprudence was most recently extended in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the Court's landmark ruling on campaign-finance regulation handed down at the end of 2003. As it had done on multiple occasions since early in the twentieth century, the Court accepted legislative judgment that corporate treasuries represent a threat of corruption when deployed directly in candidate elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In deciding not to rule in Nike, Inc. v. Kasky, the Supreme Court of the United States passed up an ideal opportunity to answer an urgent question that derives from two legacies of New York Times v. Sullivan: When speech implicates both the commercial speech doctrine and the political speech doctrine, how should that speech be assessed in terms of First Amendment protection? This analysis focuses upon the essential principles emphasized in Sullivan's landmark assessment of the societal value in protecting some false speech in the discussion of public issues. Concerns over the Nike case's implications for corporate expression must be weighed against the societal interest in preventing false commercial speech from being immunized by attaching it to a public issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]