Home > constitution, corporations, Greenwald, Lessig, limited liability, religion, rent-seeking, speech > Free speech 2: Finally, someone else – Larry Lessig – gets it on state-created corporations and speech!

Free speech 2: Finally, someone else – Larry Lessig – gets it on state-created corporations and speech!

Further to my preceding post on speech and corporations, I highly recommend Lawrence Lessig`s insightful short piece, “The Principled and Pure Court? A Reply to Glenn Greenwald” (HuffPo, January 27).

For those who haven`t seen it yet, I take the liberty of quoting liberally (emphasis added):

Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald
is just about the most persistent and effective critic of money in
politics today. He is among the least starry-eyed reporters studying
Congress. But his essay defending the Court’s judgment in Citizens United would have been better had he sprinkled a bit of the skepticism he has for Congress on the words penned by the Court….

The First Amendment, Greenwald tells us, is an absolute. It applies
not to “persons”; it “simply bans Congress from making any laws
abridging freedom of speech.” This law plainly banned these entities —
whether persons or not — from a freedom of speech. Ergo, this law is,
and should have been found to be, unconstitutional.

Sounds good. Sounds principled. Sounds refreshingly different from
anything else that happens within the reach of DC (i.e., good and
principled).

But apply that same test to the following (not so hypothetical) free
speech case: A bunch of doctors practice in family planning clinics.
The government issues a rule that says certain doctors in certain
clinics are not allowed to discuss abortion as a method of family
planning. They can talk about abstinence. Or condoms. But they are not
allowed to advise their pregnant patients that they have the liberty to
abort their fetus.

Sounds like — under the First Amendment Greenwald describes — a
simple case. Whether or not doctors are persons (and at least some are
just mere mortals), they should have the freedom to speak. Advising
someone about a legal medical procedure is among the core freedoms one
would expect a Free Speech Clause to serve.

Yet in 1991, in an opinion by Chief Justice Robert’s former boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the case of Rust v. Sullivan,
the Court found no First Amendment problem at all with the government’s
restriction on doctors’ speech. Indeed, it wasn’t even a difficult case
according to the Court (“no question but that the statutory prohibition
contained in § 1008 is constitutional.”)

Why? How? Well the doctors at issue worked in family planning
clinics that had received at least some of their funds from the
government. And in exchange for that benefit, the government was free
to gag the doctors however it wished.
The doctors were free of course
to work in a family planning clinic not funded at all by the government
(for of course, there are plenty of those) (that’s a joke). But so long
as the doctors take this benefit from the government, they’ve got to
live by the rules of the government, at least so long as those rules
serve some legitimate state end.

So how is this case related to Citizens United? For the law wasn’t
applying exclusively to entities that had received something from the
government. It was applying to all corporations.

But of course, corporations do receive a gift from the government.
The government limits the legal liability of investors in that
corporation in exchange for their risking their capital to spur
innovation and growth. That benefit is significant. And the First
Amendment question is whether in granting that benefit, the state would
be free to limit the political advocacy that corporations engage in.

It seems astonishing to imagine the state couldn’t. State law has
historically had wide freedoms to condition the corporate form as they
wished. This fact has led some, including my colleague, Sina Kian, to
argue that Citizens United is less than people think. That the decision
notwithstanding, states could build this limit into their corporate
charters. Or that maybe even Congress could induce states to do the
same. The question then would be the reason the government had for
demanding the entity give up this liberty in exchange for the corporate
form. Traditionally, the burden of that question is the easiest for the
government to meet — is there any state interest at all?
In Rust, the
interest was that that government didn’t like abortion.

But I agree with Greenwald that there is something unseemly in the
idea that the government could restrict the speech of a class because
it doesn’t like the speech of that class.

Yet this is the most confused part of the commentary (and reaction)
of most to this kind of regulation. If the government’s reason for
silencing corporations is that they don’t like what corporations would
say — if it thinks, for example, that it would be too Republican, or
too pro-business — then that’s got to be a terrible reason for the
regulation, and we all ought to support a decision that strikes a law
so inspired.

That, however, is not the only, or the best, justification behind
the regulations at issue in Citizens United. Those rules not about
suppressing a point of view. They’re about avoiding a kind of
dependency that undermines trust in our government.
The concentrated,
and tacitly, coordinated efforts by large and powerful economic
entities — made large and powerful in part because of the gift of
immunity given by the state — could certainly help lead many to
believe “money is buying results” in Congress. Avoiding that belief —
just like avoiding the belief that money bought results on the Supreme
Court — has got to be an important and valid interest of the state.

If the Court really means to say that entities that fund or create
other entities can’t limit the power of those entities to speak — so
the government can’t stop doctors from talking about abortion, or the
IRS can’t stop non-profits from talking about politics — then we
really have crossed a Bladerunner line. For that conclusion really does
mean that these entities were “created with certain unalienable
rights,” even though they were created by a pretty pathetic creator —
the state.

My point is not that the state’s power to condition should be
unlimited. The point instead is that it’s not so simple, or absolute,
as Greenwald would have it. And given the true complexity of these
evolving and complicated doctrines, it is certainly fair to be critical
in the extreme of this decision by the Court, favoring speech that most
believe it naturally likes (unlike abortion-speak), in a decision that
ignores the judgment of Congress about the conditions under which the
integrity of that body, or any election, proceeds.

It seems to me that Lessig doesn`t go far enough, in questioning as I have all of the negative consequences of the state grant of limited liability to the owners of corporations. Surely any libertarian worth his salt should do so.

But Lessig has understated his own case: the government has a valid interest in seeking to prevent not only the appearance that “money is buying results”, but actual corruption and sweet deals as well. Surely the Constitution was not intended to let wealthy individuals to get a leg up on everyone else by laundering their speech through a company and on a tax-deductible basis.

Further, Lessig fails to noted that the Supreme Court could easily have avoided overturning laws and decades of precedents and public understanding – and could have provided much-needed clarity – by concluding that the statements coming from corporations are NOT entitled to protection as First Amendment “speech”, because corporations are legal entities and not themselves actual individuals capable of “speaking” for purposes of the First Amendment. Such a decision would leave all corporate spokesmen and shareholders bearing, like the rest of us do, personal liability and moral sanction for false or offensive speech (though insurance or indemnification by others might of course be be available).

But via the growth of concentrated power enabled by the state establishment of the corporate form, we appear to be rapidly becoming a nation a county “of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation”.

Banning corporate political speech (and campaign contributions) would dampen the rent-seeking pressures that have fuelled to the growth of the state; such steps would also invigorate public discourse – and build greater national trust – by making it clear WHO is actually doing the talking (or letting the body politic discount whenever speech is anonymous).

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