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In this article author talks about articles by Adam Winkler including detailed the way the Court in those post-Bellotti cases on corporate political media spending had moved beyond a quid pro quo understanding of corruption.

As the most influential theory in modern First Amendment law turns 100, this study integrates in a unified format centric to marketplace of ideas theory an assessment of developments with the potential to reconstruct broad media marketplaces into an array of cocoons, silos and bubbles of fabricated reality. That assessment provides the basis to argue that the most fundamental threat to marketplace-of-ideas theory lies in whether an effective framework can be developed for responding to particular uses of socially networked algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the late seventies behind-the-scenes battle led by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., that forged a five-justice majority for a narrow Supreme Court holding in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti to bring corporate political media spending within the protections of the First Amendment. It shows that justices on the Court then recognized the holding as a considerably greater alteration of established law than another five-justice majority would maintain in 2010—when it expanded the influence of corporate money on democratic processes and the marketplace of ideas far beyond that seventies precedent. Justices William H. Rehnquist and Byron R. White remained so dissatisfied with the result in Bellotti that each authored harsh dissents declaring the majority holding to be completely at odds with settled law, and both remained on the Court long enough to have the opportunity to help form majorities in a series of subsequent cases that served to substantially narrow its holding. Nevertheless, Bellotti established a firm enough footing in the case law to allow the majority at the Court in 2010 to extend its reach far beyond what was established in 1978. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 5-4 vote, handed down Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a sweeping ruling providing more protection for corporate political media spending as First Amendment 'speech' than ever before. This article demonstrates that Citizens United nullified a century of democratic will by representing First Amendment protection for such spending to be part of nature rather than a legal construct. If Cass Sunstein's influential assessment is correct that the lesson of Lochner v. New York is the judicial error inherent in imposing such artificial baselines to measure the constitutionality of government regulation, then Citizens United can be understood to repeat that error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The test for determining the “functional equivalency of express advocacy” established by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007 could well signal a propitious turning point for the corporate free-speech movement—efforts to develop First Amendment protection for corporate political media spending. The test creates the potential to undermine the doctrine the Supreme Court of the United States constructed in support of more than a century of legislative judgment seeking to wall off the corrupting force of such spending from candidate elections. This article assesses that potential through analysis of Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., in which the Chief Justice established that test. His test attracted sharp criticism from so many other justices that the case may offer less than clear guidance for lower courts on its rationale. But the fact that there can be no confusion as to its holding would seem to offer reason for optimism to corporate interests in similar cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy of First Amendment scholar Margaret Blanchard deeply informs this article. During the latter years of her distinguished career, problems arising from regulations imposed by institutional review boards on scholars working in her field were among her deepest concerns. In her own writing and in public comments recorded by others, Blanchard articulated those concerns passionately and repeatedly. This article considers how IRB regulations on journalistic research methods might fare if subjected to the judicial scrutiny of a First Amendment challenge. Through analysis of relevant case law, the article considers critical elements likely to be at issue. Regardless whether the plaintiff in such a challenge could in fact prevail—given the possibility that case law on conditions imposed in return for government funding could be held to apply to the regulations in question—the analysis suggests that such regulations are at odds with American free-speech traditions and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Over the course of the 1970s, Mobil Oil made The New York Times oped page the focus of a groundbreaking advocacy strategy to promote interests that went far beyond its immediate business objectives. This study considers that influential campaign in terms of its significance for intellectual history, particularly Mobil's efforts to reframe understanding of the marketplace of ideas in First Amendment theory and practice. Although other corporations produced advocacy messages in the seventies, none spoke so regularly on so many issues of public policy as Mobil did during that period. This research documents the way rhetoric was employed in Mobil's Times editorial-advocacy campaign to frame the corporate role in democratic processes as identical to that of the individual citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]