UNDERSTANDING THE AGE OF CITIZENS UNITED THROUGH BECKER'S THEORY OF 'HISTORY THAT DOES WORK IN THE WORLD'.

Midway through the first decade of the Citizens United age of campaign-finance regulation and its role in altering any number of legal, political, economic, and social realities over time, this article considers the historical roots of those dramatic changes through historian Carl Becker's theory of the past that tries to identify "history that does work in the world, the history that influences the course of history." That analytic approach is utilized to assess the interplay among critical elements involved in the way a late twentieth-century justice on the United States Supreme Court may have come to apprehend the societal role of corporate political media spending and effect that understanding so as to transform such spending into protected First Amendment speech, "imaginatively" recreating history "as an artificial extension of his personal experience.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]