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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]

The debate between the majority and the dissenting justices in the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in McConnell v, Federal Election Commission refocused attention on one particularly intense dispute in First Amendment law that has been simmering among the Justices over the past quarter-century: corporate speech doctrine. Although the Court extended First Amendment protection to corporate political media spending in relation to referenda in 1978, subsequent cases have permitted regulation of such spending in order to prevent corruption of democratic processes in candidate elections. The Supreme Court's most recent case on corporate speech highlighted the potential for the Court to shift its jurisprudence back toward a laissez-faire doctrine that would more greatly advantage corporate participants in the marketplace of ideas and signaled the continuing relevance of scholarly and judicial debate on the subject. Dissenting justices have argued repeatedly and there is no basis in principle or in law why business corporations should be denied full First Amendment rights. This monograph argues that such a position contradicts a significant body of relevant case law, but more broadly how the reasoning that forms the constitutional basis for regulation of corporate political spending can compellingly be expressed through the procedural tenets of Alexander Meiklejohn's town-meeting model of the First Amendment. The monograph draws upon those tenets to advance a highly principled theory for considering corporate speech jurisprudence in a manner that most truly advances freedom of the political marketplace and democratic debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]