Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

The role of money in federal elections has never been more prominent than in this, the 2012 presidential, cycle.  It is thus quite natural that commentators these days would lavish attention on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 blockbuster Supreme Court ruling saying that corporations and unions, just like individual persons, are entitled under the First Amendment to expend money to independently advocate in favor of or against candidates for elective office.

In this column, I look closely at a recent discussion of Citizens United provided by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. In the end, I conclude that while the story Toobin tells is elegant, fascinating and enlightening (as almost all of Toobin’s writing is), the analysis he offers does not fully work for me, or at least it requires a fair bit more explanation than he offers.

Background on the Citizens United Case

The Citizens United case arose under the federal McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, in which Congress tried to prohibit ads and other electioneering activities that advocate for or against any presidential candidate, that are paid for by corporate funds, and that run within 30 days of an election.  A nonprofit corporation called “Citizens United” had produced and readied for airing a cable TV video-on-demand documentary advocating against then-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton shortly before a presidential primary.  The Federal Election Commission (FEC)—the federal agency charged with enforcement of federal election laws—ruled that the documentary movie amounted to “electioneering communication” and was thus covered under McCain-Feingold’s proscriptions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed with the FEC, and the Citizens United organization went to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal statute did not, and could not constitutionally, prohibit the airing of the documentary.  The case was first argued before the Supremes (with Republican loyalist and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson representing Citizens United) in March of 2009.  The federal government was represented by Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart.

More than three months after the argument, on June 29, the Justices, in an unusual move, decided not to resolve the case before their annual summer recess, but instead asked that the case be reargued the following Term (beginning in fall 2009), and that the parties focus this time on the larger questions of whether the differential treatment between corporations and individuals embodied in McCain-Feingold (and other campaign finance laws) was fundamentally inconsistent with the First Amendment, and whether past Court decisions upholding such differential treatment needed to be overruled.

The case was reargued in September 2009, and in early 2010 the Court issued its blockbuster 5-4 decision affording corporations the same First Amendment right as is enjoyed by individuals to make election-related express advocacy expenditures.

Toobin’s Take on Citizens United

Toobin, in his recent (May 21) New Yorker piece, “Money Unlimited,” provides a riveting backstory to the 2010 ruling.  A lawyer as well as a journalist, Toobin is a prominent translator of constitutional work product for lay audiences.  He has written books and dozens of articles discussing the Supreme Court, its cases, and its people.  Toobin generally does not advance or critique abstract legal theory or cutting-edge doctrinal approaches to interpreting and implementing the Constitution.  Instead, he seeks to make (and succeeds in making) legal concepts accessible to intelligent non-lawyers.  (It is because he is so successful and influential in this regard that what he writes deserves evaluation.)  In much of his work, Toobin emphasizes personal qualities and characteristics of the participants in legal episodes, and suggests how these qualities and characteristics can affect legal outcomes.  He also often explores the intellectual styles and modus operandi of decisionmakers in order to help readers make sense of the size and shape of the law.

It is thus not surprising that Toobin would tell the story of how Citizens United came to be by focusing on the personal strategic and leadership instincts of Chief Justice John Roberts, and on a dramatic (and what Toobin sees as a fundamentally game-changing) skirmish between the government’s lawyer in the first oral argument in the case, Malcolm Stewart, and the conservative Justices on the Court.

Toobin’s essay has many layers to it, but the basic suggestion he makes boils down to this:  The Citizens United case was on track to be resolved by the Court in a way that “might well be forgotten—a narrow ruling on a remote aspect of campaign-finance law,” but that the first oral argument took the “case—and the law—in an entirely new direction,” and that, in particular, Mr. Stewart’s answer to one specific question was “an epic disaster” that “changed the case, and perhaps American history.”

Toobin’s strong implication (though he never quite says it this plainly) is that absent the transformational oral argument exchange between Mr. Stewart and the conservative Justices, the Court would likely have decided Citizens United simply by holding that the FEC and the D.C. Circuit were wrong in concluding that McCain-Feingold applied to the documentary in question; the case would thus have been resolved in terms of statutory interpretation (albeit statutory interpretation informed by the limits of the Constitution), rather than in terms of broad First Amendment first principles protecting corporations and other well-heeled interests.

But because of the fateful exchange, Toobin’s account goes, the five conservative Justices ended up reaching out and asking for new briefing and argument on the bigger constitutional issues that had theretofore been in the background.  According to Toobin, although the conservatives needed to go through the procedural hassle of waiting a year to make major constitutional change, the back-and-forth at Stewart’s oral argument set into motion the chain of events that led to a sweeping 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which in turn has opened the door to the huge infusion of money into the so-called “Super PACs” in this, the 2012, election.

What was this momentous Q & A in the first oral argument?  It was a series of queries about whether the ban on electioneering communications in McCain-Feingold could limit not just electronic media, but also books.

Justice Alito asked Stewart:  Could government limit a corporation from “providing [the same thing Citizens United provided in its documentary] in a book?  Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?”

Stewart’s response was straightforward:  “They [the limits on corporate-sponsored express advocacy pieces] could have been applied to additional media as well.”

Toobin argues that Stewart made a tactical blunder here.  According to Toobin, in the key part of his essay, “Stewart was wrong.  Congress could not ban a book.  McCain-Feingold was based on the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life.  The influence of books operates in a completely different way.  Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book.  Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment.”

Assessing Toobin’s Account:  The Difficulty of His Proffered Distinction Between Books and Electronic Media

Before I explain my reaction to Toobin’s piece, let me disclose that I personally know both Toobin and Stewart.  I have met Toobin a few times, and I have exchanged a small number of emails with him.  I am a fan of his overall body of work, and I consider him a friendly acquaintance.  Mr. Stewart is someone I have known, worked with, and admired for over two decades.  He and I were classmates in law school and co-clerks in Justice Blackmun’s chambers, and I count him as a very close friend.  So while, in my discussion below, I try to analyze Toobin’s account as objectively as I possibly can, readers should be aware of potential blind spots on my part, as they think about the issues I discuss.

After digesting his essay, I remain somewhat unsatisfied by Toobin’s account in at least three ways.  Perhaps there are compelling answers to some or more of the questions I raise in these three respects, but I would need to hear them to be convinced.

First, the distinction Toobin draws between books containing advocacy (which he says cannot be regulated) and commercials that contain the same advocacy (which he suggests can be regulated) may not be easily workable in theory or in practice.

As to theory, are TV commercials really unavoidable (and for that reason regulable) in the way Toobin suggests?  Why can’t viewers change the channel or turn off the TV, just as they can decide not to purchase a book they see displayed in a bookstore window?  Putting aside truly “captive” audiences (e.g., passengers who use public transportation for their daily commute, etc.), why can’t we trust consumers of TV ads to self-screen just as we can trust consumers of books to do so?

And in practice, the line-drawing problems are formidable, perhaps even insurmountable.  If you can ban certain TV ads but not books, then what about TV ads promoting those books?  If you can ban TV ads, can you ban analogous newspaper ads?  If not, why not?  Newspaper ads are no more “avoidable” than are TV ads.  And if you can ban newspaper ads, what about pamphlets?  And if you can ban pamphlets but not books, when does a pamphlet become voluminous enough to become a book?  And what would we do with Internet ads and advocacy blogs that are financed by corporation money?

As a general matter, discriminating between different types of media has not been free from difficulty under First Amendment doctrine.  There are some older cases, most of which predate the information revolution, in which radio and TV are treated differently than print because the scarcity of airwaves historically has given government a freer hand. But that rationale has not easily been applied to cable entertainment (the context in which the Citizens United video was being offered).  More generally, airwave scarcity is not as tenable a justification for government regulation of electronic media as it once was.

The Second Problem with Toobin’s Analysis:  The Facts of the Citizens United Case Themselves

But let’s put aside the question whether, at some big-picture level, differentiation between books, on the one hand, and TV commercials, on the other, is permissible or required under the First Amendment.  There’s another serious problem here, too: On the facts of the Citizens United case, the answer that Toobin suggests that Stewart should have offered could easily have gotten him into more trouble than it might spare.

Why?  Because the Citizens United case did not involve a television commercial; it involved a feature-length 90-minute documentary movie that was available via on-demand cable!  Even if Toobin is onto something (and he may be) when he says there is a constitutionally significant difference between a 60-second TV spot “imposed” upon reluctant viewers and a book that would-be readers have to go buy or borrow in order to read, how is a 90-minute on-demand movie–that is, one that must be selected by viewers in order to be seen– any different than a book that, in Toobin’s own words, readers make an “affirmative choice to acquire and read”?  What I am saying here is that Stewart could not easily have proffered the answer Toobin suggests, because the very movie at issue in the case would have fallen on the wrong side of the constitutional line that Toobin wants to draw!

Had Stewart said, “Your Honors, books cannot be regulated because people can choose not to acquire and read them,” the Justices would have pounced on him and retorted, “Well, isn’t the same true of the 90-minute on-demand cable documentary the government seeks to regulate here?”  Perhaps Stewart could have done some fancy dancing about how Congress is entitled to draw broad categories that make general sense and then apply those categorical rules to particular instances in which the rationales for the categorical differentiation aren’t present, even in the First Amendment realm, and even where the constitutional claim challenges a particular statute’s application rather than the statute’s facial essence.  But the chances that such a tap dance would have succeeded seem exceedingly low.

In the end, then, Toobin’s gripe seems less with Stewart’s oral argument or with any of the answers Stewart gave there, but more with the government’s decision to apply McCain-Feingold in the context, not of a 60-second ad, but of a 90-minute on-demand cable movie, in the first place.

Perhaps there is a basis for criticism in the FEC’s decision to construe McCain-Feingold as applying to the documentary, and the DOJ’s strategic choice to support that decision (I express no view on those matters), but all of that was decided by the government when it decided to contest the lawsuit filed by Citizens United.  It was at that point that the die was cast, and if the conservative Justices were going to be angered by the aggressive stance taken by the government, that anger had nothing to do with oral argument, but instead with the initial decision by the government to regulate the movie in question.  And if that anger was going to cause the Court to “go big” by resolving the case in a dramatic, comprehensive First Amendment fashion, then the oral argument flashpoint Toobin highlights was neither here nor there.

My Third Reservation:  Where Is the Link Between Stewart’s Oral Argument and Justice Kennedy’s Ambition?

My third reservation about Toobin’s thesis is related to my second.  Toobin suggests, without fully explaining his reasoning, that the response Stewart gave about books is what caused the Court to call for reargument and widen the scope of the case.

Toobin recounts, seemingly based on some access to behind-the-scenes information—much of what he describes would not have been publicly accessible—that after Stewart’s argument, Chief Justice Roberts first circulated a draft opinion that would have resolved the case narrowly by simply deciding that the statute didn’t cover this film (which was Citizens United’s initial argument, on which they lost before the FEC), but that Justice Kennedy wrote a draft concurring opinion in which he indicated that the differential statutory treatment of corporations in McCain-Feingold itself violated the Constitution, and that older cases permitting discrimination against corporations should be overruled.

It was at that point, Toobin says, that Chief Justice Roberts understood that if the case were to be reargued, there would be five votes for a broad, constitutional invalidation of this major cog in the McCain-Feingold law.

So, Toobin says, Roberts got the Court to vote for reargument and, after that new argument took place, he assigned the majority opinion to Justice Kennedy, who then converted his concurrence draft into an opinion for a five-member Court majority.

But what’s missing from Toobin’s story—and this is the critical point—is any specific reason to believe that Kennedy and the other four Justices who ended up joining him were moved in any way by Stewart’s oral argument answer.

On the face of things, it seems unlikely that Stewart’s oral argument answer was a significant factor.  Remember that, according to Toobin’s own account, well after the first oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts drafted and circulated a narrow opinion resolving the case.  If Stewart’s oral argument had caused any of the conservative Justices to want to decide the case more ambitiously, wouldn’t that have been made known to the Chief Justice in the post-argument conference on which he based his decision about how to draft the opinion that he planned to circulate to garner a majority?  Why did the oral argument’s catalyst effect take weeks or months to manifest itself to the point where Chief Justice Roberts, a sharp cookie to be sure, could see it?

If Toobin has any inside information that might rebut the natural inference of non-causation based on the time lapse I describe, one might have thought that he’d be able to quote, or at least summarize, a source’s words to the effect that Stewart’s broad answer asserting regulatory powers over books is what sent Justice Kennedy or others over the cliff.  But Toobin makes no such suggestion.

Indeed, much of Toobin’s essay is devoted to explaining that Justice Kennedy has been constitutionally opposed to a great deal of campaign finance law—and the differential treatment of corporations under it—for two decades.  As Toobin puts the point, “All the Justices knew that Kennedy’s views were most extreme when it came to the First Amendment.”

This is likely true, but it undercuts, rather than supports, Toobin’s suggestion that Stewart’s argument answer had anything to do with Justice Kennedy’s (ultimately successful) gambit to use this case to remake First Amendment law.

More generally, as Toobin himself acknowledges, once Justice Alito replaced Justice O’Connor, it was clear as early as 2007 (in the Wisconsin Right to Life case) that “five Justices would soon declare the McCain-Feingold law unconstitutional.”  If astute observers (including Toobin) saw this three years before Citizens United was handed down, then why does Toobin think Stewart’s oral argument had any effect on anything?

And even if Stewart’s oral argument did make a difference in that litigation (which seems unlikely), wouldn’t it only be a matter of a short period of time before the Court found another case to use to do exactly what it did in Citizens United?  Failing to fend off the inevitable for a year or two is hardly changing the course of history.

Let me be clear:  I am not saying that oral argument never counts.  But it usually doesn’t, and in the rare case when it does, ordinarily the outside world can’t be sure of its effect.  I recognize that causation, or lack thereof, is impossible to prove in these kinds of instances.  But I think that if someone is asserting that oral argument changed the outcome or the scope of a particular case, and there is no offer of direct evidence of anything said by members of the Court or their staff in the days or weeks following the argument, notwithstanding obvious access to some “inside” sources, then he or she must do more than simply point out that the ultimate outcome surprised some early observers, and that there were some dramatic and excited moments at argument.

Here’s a good example:  Six months ago, the overwhelming majority of first-rate constitutional analysts expected that the Court would uphold Obamacare because the arguments under traditional modes of constitutional interpretation seem so one-sided.  And there is no real doubt that oral argument went poorly for Solicitor General Verrilli in March; there were clearly dramatic and difficult moments for him.  (I myself have written that he could, and should, have had much better answers to the predictable “slippery slope” questions thrown at him.)  But if the Court strikes down the mandate 5-4, we should not think that the result was caused by Verrilli’s subpar oral argument, and that if only he had been better in answering questions, the Court would then have come out the other way.  That explanation is possible, but the more likely explanation—again, assuming the Court does end up striking down Obamacare—is that five Justices had decided before argument that they didn’t think Congress had the power to create the mandate, and nothing at oral argument either way would have mattered to them.

Toobin may be correct in suggesting that Citizens United is not just a case, but rather a way of thinking about the world and the First Amendment (just as the term “PATRIOT Act” has symbolic import that goes beyond a single statute about counterterrorism).  As Toobin puts things, “[t]he Roberts Court . . . will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”

I can’t say if this is truly what Citizens United means, but if so, that legacy—much more than any personally interesting but to me largely speculative connection between an entertaining oral argument exchange and a decision by the Court to reshape the law—is the real human-interest story that is worth telling and worth hearing.  I look forward to future chapters in which Toobin conveys more of it.

Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

’Tis the season to be a college protestor.  With a momentous presidential election on the horizon, the Occupy Movement promising to kick into high gear again, and young adults facing uncertain job prospects and ever-increasing higher education costs and debt loads, students at campuses across the country are understandably seeking ways of demonstrating their deep discontent and anxiety about the status quo.

My own university—the University of California—has seen its share of unrest.  Protests at UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the so-called “free speech movement” in the 1960s, got ugly last fall, with police who were ostensibly trying to remove encampments using batons against students.  Things got out of hand here at UC Davis last fall too, with a campus police officer employing pepper spray against seated student protestors.

And more recently here at UC Davis, protestors—objecting to what they, at least, viewed as an example of the unhealthy privatization of higher education—obstructed access to a branch of a bank located on campus. (Many ardent advocates of higher education had no objection to the bank; the bank had leased space from the University to serve the campus community, and the lease would have provided two million dollars or more to the university over a 10-year period.)

After the blockades took place, notwithstanding repeated warnings from authorities that blockaders risked serious punishment, the university administration and campus police identified several students who had participated in the obstructive protests for prosecution by the County District Attorney, under state penal code sections making it a misdemeanor to willfully obstruct public walkways and places or to intentionally interfere with any lawful business. The bank provided evidence to the District Attorney’s office as well. Last month, 11 students and one faculty member were ordered to appear for booking and arraignment on misdemeanor charges of obstruction and conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor.

One of the things that has surprised me most about this episode and its aftermath is how many people—many of them sophisticated, well-educated folks—mistakenly believe that because the blockaders were obstructing the bank’s business for what they viewed as a righteous political reason, their actions were legally protected under constitutional principles of free speech.  In other words, many people are surprised to learn that the First Amendment permits punishment of this kind of expressive demonstration.  So in order to help students and other would-be protestors know when their activities will likely get them punished (so that protestors may then weigh, in an informed manner, the costs and benefits of proceeding), I offer five First Amendment myths that apparently need debunking:

Myth No. 1:  The Expressive Intent or Motive of the Protestor Is the Most Important Factor in Determining Whether His/Her Speech Can Constitutionally Be Prohibited

On rare occasions, people who are doing something to express a message—especially a political message—are immune from a regulatory law on account of their message and the particular place and time at which they need to express that message in order to be effective in communicating it.  And the Supreme Court has often said (for example, in last year’s funeral protestors case, Snyder v. Phelps) that speech about “matters of public concern” (e.g., public policies, elections, etc.) receives the highest level of First Amendment protection.

But just because you are involved in an expressive activity about something you think is important does not mean you have an automatic exemption from generally applicable laws that were passed, and are enforced, for reasons that are unrelated to the suppression of expression.  As one commentator (my brother, Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar) has put the point, The New York Times has no First Amendment license to ignore air pollution regulations.   And the U.S. Supreme Court itself has made the same kind of observation in a number of cases, perhaps most famously in United States v. O’Brien, where the Court upheld the prosecution of a Vietnam War protester who intentionally burned his government-issued official draft card, because the law prohibiting destruction of draft cards was designed not to censor, but rather to facilitate the administration of the Selective Service System.

In another seminal case, this one involving cross burning, a majority of the Court repeated the same essential idea:  “[N]onverbal expressive activity can be banned because of the action it entails, but not because of the ideas it expresses—so that burning a flag in violation of an ordinance against outdoor fires could be punishable, whereas burning a flag in violation of an ordinance against dishonoring the flag is not.”

Even some of the Justices who did not join the majority concurred on this point:  “It is true that loud speech in favor of the Republican Party can be regulated because it is loud, but not because it is pro-Republican; and it is true that the public burning of the American flag can be regulated because it involves public burning and not because it involves the flag.”

So it turns out that motive or intent does matter in First Amendment cases—but it is the government’s motive or intent, not the would-be speaker’s, that largely determines whether the First Amendment permits government punishment of an activity that someone is undertaking in order to send a message.

Myth No. 2:  Laws Regulating the “Time, Place and Manner” of Speech in a Content-Neutral Way Are Unimportant or Are a Pretext for Speech Suppression, and Thus Do Not Really Need to Be Enforced

Rules that govern the time, place and manner in which speech occur often serve weighty purposes, including the creation of an environment where those who shout the loudest are not the only ones whose speech gets to be heard. Unsurprisingly, then, the idea that no one need ever obey such rules because the rules are pretextual or unimportant finds no support in court decisions.

As the Supreme Court of California stated in an oft-cited free speech case, In Re Kay:

[T]he state retains a legitimate concern in ensuring that some individuals’ unruly assertion of their rights of free expression does not imperil other citizen’s rights of free association and discussion. … Freedom of everyone to talk at once can destroy the right of anyone effectively to talk at all. Free expression can expire as tragically in the tumult of license as in the silence of censorship.

So things like physical obstruction and blockades are conduct that government has always had the legitimate authority to proscribe, because the conduct so obviously obstructs the liberty and the lawful pursuits of others. Government prohibition of blockades or obstruction has been held to be permissible under the First Amendment too many times to count. To cite just one example, a federal law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), that prohibits anyone from physically obstructing any person from obtaining or providing reproductive health services, has been upheld repeatedly against constitutional challenge, and that statute raises harder questions than do generic obstruction laws (like the kind at issue at UC Davis) because FACE targets specific places where protestors with particular messages may be expected to gather.

To see an easy example of why anti-obstruction laws are necessary and proper, consider what would otherwise happen when two groups of opposing protestors both want to blockade a facility (say, the US Supreme Court, the day of the Affordable Care Act arguments) at the same time, or two opposing political groups want to blockade each other’s protests.  Without valid and enforceable time, place, and manner rules applicable to political protestors, political protests could easily and literally devolve into melees.

One critical reason why blockades and similar obstructions can be prohibited is that they are not intended to, and do not, persuade anyone of the merits of the protestors’ position.  They are employed to coerce third parties to change their behavior, not their minds. As such, blockades and the like are in some respects actually antithetical to, rather than in furtherance of, the values on which freedom of speech and academic freedom are grounded—a commitment to the power of ideas, rather than the use of force, to change the way that people act.

Myth Number 3:  Expressive Conduct Is Treated No Differently Than Pure Speech Is

There is a kernel of truth to this statement, in that courts often do rule in favor of people who act, rather than utter words, to get their message across.  So, for example, a few decades ago the Supreme Court twice ruled in favor of protestors in striking down laws that tried to prohibit flag burning.  And it often makes sense to downplay the speech/conduct distinction, in that all speech requires conduct or action—moving the muscles in one’s fingers or arms to make a point shouldn’t be categorically different than using the muscles in one’s jaw.  So the government’s regulation of conduct can certainly raise free speech concerns.

Yet, crucially, these free speech concerns in the conduct setting arise when the government’s regulation of conduct is intended to suppress the message that the conduct is attempting to communicate. In those instances, government is not punishing protestors in order to protect the rights of third parties.  Rather, it is regulating protestors’ expressive conduct in order to censor the protestors’ message.  So, on closer inspection, the notion that expressive conduct is protected is simply a restatement of the idea discussed above in connection with Myth No. 1—that is, the idea that the government’s motive is important.  If government regulates your expressive conduct because it is expressive, then that is a problem.  A censorial government purpose is always illicit, whether the government is targeting your words or your actions.

That is the theoretical frame.  But in practice, when the government regulates your conduct, it often can point to many non-censorial motives, such as keeping good order, preventing violence, facilitating access to public space for everyone, and so on.  As a result, the government in the real world has a much easier time regulating conduct that is mixed with speech than regulating pure speech.  Put another way, the inference of problematic government censorship is easier to generate when the government regulates pure speech, rather than speech mixed with conduct, because the government doesn’t have as many plausible innocent objectives to which it can point when speech alone is at issue.

Myth Number 4:  The Authorities Could, if They So Chose, Cut Protestors a Break When the Protestors Are Trying to Speak Out on Important Issues to Accomplish Just Results

Some have suggested that authorities should excuse violations of time, place, and manner rules when the violations are politically motivated.  If the meaning of the word “political” here is understood expansively, then this argument would seem to reject the enforcement of all content-neutral time, place and manner rules.  After all, every intentional refusal to obey a rule can be understood to express the “political” message that the actor considers his or her conduct to be more important than any obligation he or she might have to comply with the rule.

Nor does the problem go away if we define the term “political” more narrowly. Perhaps some believe that obstruction and other violations of law should be excused whenever individuals are acting in the furtherance of politically salient beliefs, that is, beliefs concerning the big issues of the day.  Obstruction and blockades that protest things like government privatization, under this analysis, should be treated as permissible expressive activities.

If this is the argument, it too has costly consequences. Presumably, under this view, laws like FACE, which protect women attempting to enter medical clinics to obtain abortion services, also could not be enforced against “political” anti-abortion activists who obstruct the entrances to clinics; anti-abortion protestors (or military funeral protestors, etc.) are assuredly expressing themselves on salient public policy questions.

And even if we could stomach the costs of permitting all protestors who are addressing big issues to do as they please, a government’s decision to prohibit all blockades except those maintained in order to express a limited class of political messages would itself likely violate the First Amendment.  That is because government cannot constitutionally discriminate on the basis of the subject matter of speech when it regulates expressive activity.

In Carey v. Brown, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting residential picketing that excluded labor picketing that was connected to a place of employment from its coverage.  Similarly, if government were to treat obstruction as permitted speech, it could not permit some blockades and not others based on the government’s (contested) sense of the political salience of the protestors’ message.

Some people may try to define the desirable exceptions more narrowly still.  For example, in the UC Davis bank episode, some have suggested that participants in the blockade of the bank should not be punished because they are promoting a political cause that is just. But, of course, treating one political perspective more favorably than another constitutes viewpoint discrimination.  And a public agency that engaged in viewpoint discrimination in regulating expressive conduct would blatantly violate the core principles on which the First Amendment is based.  So the narrower the exception from enforcement is, the larger the First Amendment problem becomes.

Government can make enforcement decisions based on things unrelated to the content or viewpoint of the expression that is involved.  So enforcement decisions based on the extent of harm actually caused or threatened by the protestors, or based on how repetitive the violations of law are, etc., are permissible.  But enforcement agencies can get into First Amendment trouble if their enforcement pattern suggests any favoritism based on particular messages; as a result (and in order to avoid being unable to enforce laws when the laws are violated in the future), many government enforcement decisionmakers tend to act more mechanically than would otherwise be expected.

Myth Number 5:  Even if Rules Have to Be Enforced By Ordinary Governments, University Campuses Are Special Places Where More Expressive Conduct Should Be Permitted

As with some of the other propositions I’ve discussed, there is a grain of truth to this statement; universities are indeed dedicated to promoting free speech, and what counts as “disruption,” or “obstruction” might be different in the context of a university quad than in the context of, say, a post office parking lot.  So, provided that public universities do not treat protestors differently based on the subject matter or viewpoint of their message (which would violate the First Amendment), they may permit a bit more operational inefficiency than do other government actors, in the name of promoting free speech.

But the problems of governing a community with tens of thousands of residents who have conflicting desires to access services and use scarce property do not disappear simply because the community is also an institution of higher education.   Again, any relaxed enforcement stance by public universities with respect to liberal protests would necessarily mean that campus authorities could not step in when on-campus student health facilities providing contraceptive services or advice about abortion are blockaded by politically motivated students who oppose the use of their student fee dollars to subsidize such services.  And you always have the problem of managing the use of limited property among competing protestors; when protestors want to counter-blockade each other’s protests, then enforcement of neutral time, place and manner rules are the only way to keep order.

One might think that private universities would be free to pick and choose how to enforce their rules, because they are not bound by the content- and viewpoint-neutrality norms of the First Amendment.  But in California, there is a statute that subjects private universities to the same constraints that the First Amendment imposes on public actors.  As long as this statute is not invalidated itself (and I do think it is open to some constitutional challenge), Stanford is no freer to selectively enforce its rules than is the UC.

Finally, I note that there is one other respect in which universities may be different (as least with regard to their students) than are other communities.  Namely, universities often have an administrative disciplinary system of enforcement (e.g., academic suspension, expulsion, etc.) at their disposal.  For this reason, criminal prosecution may not always be an appropriate or supportable response to protests that violate campus regulations or even penal laws governing on-campus conduct. In some cases, in-house discipline imposed by the university itself may be adequate and preferable, so long as decisions about which mode of enforcement to pursue are not made on the basis of the content or viewpoint of expression.

So the issue of what kind of sanction makes sense is an important one to keep in mind in the university setting.  So, too, are the related questions of how much, and what kinds of, force are appropriately used against students who violate university rules.  These two questions are beyond the scope of my column today, but obviously deserve careful attention.

By Professors Alan Brownstein and Vikram Amar.  Cross-posted from JURIST.

An unflinching commitment to freedom of speech is the cornerstone of constitutional democracy in the US. Certainly we protect freedom of speech more vigorously than any other western democracy. We also have a venerable tradition of respecting academic freedom at colleges and universities.

These two principles, freedom of speech and academic freedom, overlap and are interconnected in some ways. But they also reflect distinct ideas. Freedom of speech is a broadly applicable right that protects speakers both on and off campus from unwarranted government interference with expression. Academic freedom, which may extend beyond what the Constitution protects, is grounded on the idea that, at least in the academy, free inquiry unburdened by the constraints of orthodoxy will lead to the development of new ideas and knowledge.

At base though, both freedom of speech and academic freedom rest on the bedrock belief that ideas and arguments ought to be evaluated on their substance. The essence of both kinds of freedom is the opportunity to persuade others of the merits of one's argument, rather than the use of power to coerce others into acceding to the proponent's point of view.

Sometimes the heat and passion of political protests on college campuses causes these basic principles to be overlooked or ignored. When that happens, it is important to remember what freedom of speech and academic freedom really mean and how easily both of these principles can be misused and misinterpreted.

Recently at the University of California, Davis, protestors repeatedly obstructed access to a branch of a bank located on-campus. The bank had leased space to serve the campus community, and the lease would have provided $2 million dollars or more to the university over a 10-year period. Ultimately, and ostensibly in response to the protestors' conduct, the bank closed its campus branch office.

Photo from The Aggie.

The university administration and campus police identified several students who participated in the obstructive protests to the County District Attorney for prosecution under state penal code sections making it a misdemeanor to willfully obstruct public walkways and places or to intentionally interfere with any lawful business. The bank provided evidence to the District Attorney's office as well. On March 29, 11 students and one faculty member were ordered to appear for booking and arraignment on misdemeanor charges of obstruction and conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor.

We have no basis for evaluating the merits of the charges brought against any individual. We also recognize that prosecution is not always an appropriate or supportable response to protests that violate campus regulations or even penal laws governing on-campus conduct. The university has administrative disciplinary procedures available to it that may be enforced against obstructive behavior. In some cases, in-house discipline may be preferable to prosecution.

The point of this article is not to discuss and compare alternative remedial responses to unlawful conduct on-campus. It is to evaluate the claim that politically motivated obstruction should be immunized from sanction.

The Board of the Davis Faculty Association (DFA), an organization that is sometimes thought by the media to speak on behalf of the larger UC Davis faculty but whose membership in fact comprises a very small fraction of the professors here at the university, challenged the administration's decision to seek prosecution of the identified students, not because the students were innocent of the charges against them or because campus disciplinary procedures would be a more appropriate response for certain kinds of violations of law on-campus, but because the obstruction of the bank was politically motivated and morally just from the DFA's point of view. The DFA letter/petition to the campus administration said in relevant part:

The closure of the branch and cancellation of the contract were due to a blockade of the branch office carried out by student and faculty protesters from January through March. It is important to understand the political content of this blockade: the demonstrators continually stated their opposition to the substitution of private contracts for public funding of the UC system, and they continually pointed out conflicts of interest related to University contracts with corporations profiting from student loan interest as the UC administration continues to increase tuition, thus forcing many students to take out increased loans. ... We reiterate our support for the principled and determined actions of UC students and faculty to defend the public character of the UC system against privatization, a goal with which the blockade of the US Bank branch was consistent.

Referring to possible punishment of the students as "retroactive legal action" (as if the failure to arrest someone prior to, during or immediately after his violation somehow precludes or renders illicit the subsequent filing of charges), the DFA goes on to express its "opposition to the UC Davis administration's decision to have these cases forwarded to the DA by the police." It then asks "that the administration recognize the political content of the US Bank blockade rather than treating it as a criminal matter."

As mentioned earlier, the DFA Board does not speak for many people. But that even a few faculty members at one of the nation's top universities would misunderstand the basics of freedom of speech and/or academic freedom is troubling, and suggests the need to use this episode as a "teachable moment." For the reality is that the DFA's position is unworkable under any reasonable interpretation of free speech doctrine or academic freedom principles.

To begin with, it bears noting that a blockade is not, of course, constitutionally protected speech. It is conduct that government has always had the legitimate authority to proscribe because the conduct so obviously obstructs the liberty and lawful pursuits of others. Government actions to prohibit blockades or obstruction have been held to be permissible under the First Amendment too many times to count. To cite just one example, a federal law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), that prohibits anyone from physically obstructing any person from obtaining or providing reproductive health services, has been upheld repeatedly against constitutional challenge, and those cases raise harder questions than do generic obstruction laws (like the kind at issue at UC Davis) because FACE targets specific places where protestors with particular messages may be expected.

One critical reason why blockades can be prohibited is that they are not intended to and do not persuade anyone of the merits of the protestors' position. They are employed to coerce third parties to change their behavior, not their minds. As such, they are actually antithetical to, rather than in furtherance of, the values on which freedom of speech and academic freedom are grounded — a commitment to the power of ideas rather than the use of force to change the way that people act.

The courts do recognize that sometimes government regulation of otherwise proscribable conduct can raise free speech concerns. This occurs when conduct is engaged in for expressive purposes, such as the burning of an American flag, and, crucially, the regulation of conduct is intended to suppress the message that the conduct is attempting to communicate. In those instances, government is punishing protestors not to protect the rights of third parties; it is regulating protestors' expressive conduct to censor the protestors' message. But the DFA's complaint is not (nor could it be, based on the available evidence) that the campus administration and police seek to prosecute the bank blockaders but would take no enforcement action against other blockaders who engaged in obstruction for different, "approved," purposes. In other words, the DFA does not rail against discriminatory enforcement. Instead, the DFA argues for discriminatory enforcement that provides the protestors special immunities. It demands that the campus and police treat the students involved in this blockade differently and more favorably relative to other students engaged in obstructive behavior, because of the expressive political purpose and message of the protestors at the bank.

Whether this suggestion by the DFA is viewed broadly or narrowly, it makes little sense. Let us look first at a broad understanding of DFA's submission. If the DFA is using the term "political content" expansively, its argument would seem to reject the enforcement of all content-neutral time, place and manner rules. After all, all intentional disobedience of a rule can be understood to express the "political" message that the actor considers his or her conduct to be more important than any obligation to comply with the rule. Time, place and manner rules often serve important purposes, however, including the creation of an environment where those who shout the loudest are not the only people who get to speak and be heard. Unsurprisingly, the idea that no one need ever obey such rules simply because they have "political" reasons for refusing to do so finds no support in court decisions.

As the Supreme Court of California stated in an important free speech case, In Re Kay:

[T]he state retains a legitimate concern in ensuring that some individuals unruly assertion of their rights of free expression does not imperil other citizen's rights of free association and discussion. ... Freedom of everyone to talk at once can destroy the right of anyone effectively to talk at all. Free expression can expire as tragically in the tumult of license as in the silence of censorship.

Perhaps the DFA intends for the term "political content" to be interpreted more narrowly. Perhaps the DFA is suggesting that obstruction and other violations of law should be excused whenever individuals are engaged in blockades in the furtherance of politically salient beliefs, that is, beliefs concerning the big issues of the day. Obstruction and blockades about things like privatization, under this analysis, should be treated as permissible, if not protected, expressive activities.

If this is the argument, it too has costly consequences. Presumably, under this view, laws like FACE, which protect women attempting to enter medical clinics to obtain abortion services, could not be enforced against "political" anti-abortion activists blockading the entrances to clinics. And what happens when two groups of opposing protestors both want to blockade a facility (say the US Supreme Court the day of the health care oral arguments) at the same time, or two opposing political groups want to blockade each other's protests? Without valid and enforceable time, place and manner rules applicable to political protestors, political protest could easily and literally devolve into melees.

Alternatively, maybe the suggestion is that laws prohibiting obstruction should be enforced off campus, but not on a college campus. But the problems do not disappear when protests occur at institutions of higher education. Under this analysis, campus administrators and police could not step in when on-campus student health facilities providing contraceptive services or advice about abortion are blockaded by politically motivated students who oppose the use of their student fee dollars to subsidize such services. And you still have the problem of managing the use of scarce property among competing protestors.

Logistical costs aside, if we tried to treat only salient political blockades as permitted expressive activity, a public university's decision to prohibit all blockades except those maintained in order to express a limited class of political messages would itself violate the First Amendment. Government cannot discriminate on the basis of the subject of speech when it regulates expressive activity. In Carey v. Brown, for example, the US Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting residential picketing that excluded labor picketing connected to a place of employment from its coverage. Similarly, if the university is going to treat obstruction as permitted speech, it cannot permit some blockades based on the university's (contested) sense of the political salience of the protestors' message.

It may be that the DFA's position is narrower still. When it states that "[w]e reiterate our support for the principled and determined actions of UC students and faculty to defend the public character of the UC system against privatization, a goal with which the blockade of the US Bank branch was consistent," the DFA appears to be arguing that participants in the blockade of the bank should not be punished because they are promoting a political cause which the DFA supports. Treating one political perspective more favorable than another, of course, constitutes viewpoint discrimination. A public university that engaged in viewpoint discrimination in regulating expressive conduct would blatantly violate the core principles on which the First Amendment is based. You don't need to have attended law school to intuit that.

In adopting a political position and permitting that viewpoint to influence its regulation of campus protests, a public university would be undermining more than the First Amendment. It would also be destroying any justification it might offer for protecting the academic freedom of its faculty and departments. When a university engages in viewpoint discrimination, it demonstrates that it is no longer committed to open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. The university instead morphs into a political institution committed to particular perspectives — so much so that it excuses violations of law when the violators happen to agree with the orthodoxy of its political positions. We value political institutions in society (such as political parties). But public universities serve different purposes and would lose much of their distinctive worth and claim to public support if they succumbed to partisan political canons of truth and legitimacy.

We understand that in any society, individuals may feel compelled to engage in civil disobedience. This respected form of protest, however, bears no resemblance to the blockade of a bank and the accompanying insistence that those who engaged in obstruction should be immunized from the consequences of their conduct. Civil disobedience involves the deliberate decision to disobey an unjust law. Students challenging segregated facilities in the Jim Crow south by sitting in at lunch counters and bus stations engaged in civil disobedience by refusing to submit to racist laws. Laws regulating the time, place and manner of activities on public property in race-neutral, content-neutral, viewpoint neutral ways that leave open ample other opportunities for expression (and the campus' regulations have to and do satisfy these standards to be permissible) are not unjust laws.

More importantly, the communicative power of civil disobedience gains its force by protestors demonstrating the strength of their convictions by their willingness to be arrested and sanctioned for violating the law. Last time we checked, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the person for whom our law school building is named, understood the difference between civil disobedience to unjust and unconstitutional laws and legitimate, constitutionally acceptable time, place and manner laws to which he had no basis for moral or legal objection.

Harvard University Press just sent me a copy of the new book, The Offensive Internet, edited by University of Chicago law professors Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum (each of whom also contributes a chapter in the book). 

The book is an important antidote to the often Panglossian approach of early cyberspace enthusiasts.

I contributed a chapter titled "Youthful Indiscretion in the Internet Age." It's a collection of thoughtful papers. While you are likely to disagree with many of them (as I do), the papers each make significant contributions to the literature.

I have been intrigued by the attention national media have given this week to a criminal trial in West Texas.  Ann Mitchell, an administrative nurse at the community hospital in Winkler County, went on trial in state court charged with "misuse of official information," a third-degree felony that carried a possible fine of $10,000 and up to 10 years in prison.  The charges stemmed from an anonymous letter that Mitchell and another administrative nurse wrote to the Texas Medical Board.  In it, they called the Board's attention to irregularities in how Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles was practicing medicine at the hospital where they worked.  The nature of the irregularities and report are described in a New York Times story as "a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was later flagged as inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services."  The nurses believed they were under a professional obligation to make the report, but following it, the Winkler County Sheriff's Office seized their work computers and arrested them.  The local prosecutor subsequently charged the nurses with the third-degree felony, and the Winkler County Hospital fired them.  Those consequences apparently unfolded after the Medical Board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint and he told his "friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter."  The prosecutor says that Mrs. Mitchell has a history of making "inflammatory" statements about Dr. Arafiles and that she did not make the report in good faith.  To establish the felony charged, however, the State must prove that she disseminated confidential information for a "nongovernmental purpose" with intent to harm Dr. Arafiles. 

The prosecutor dropped charges against Mrs. Mitchell's colleague just before the case went to trial.  A jury in neighboring Andrews County acquitted Mrs. Mitchell on Thursday.  The jury voted unanimously on the first ballot to acquit the nurse and questioned why she had ever been arrested.  Read more here.

New York Times reporter Kevin Sack observed that "seeming conflicts of interest are as abundant as the cattle grazing among the pump jacks and mesquite" in the small town of Kermit, population 5,714, where these events unfolded.  Indeed, subsequent reports reveal an additional conflict:  according to filings in a federal case the nurses have brought against Arafiles, the Sheriff, and Winkler County, the Sheriff is a partner in Dr. Arafiles' herbal supplement business, a business that Arafiles promoted in emails to patients.   

Despite the obscure locale of these events--or perhaps because of it--the New York Times published three items about them last week.  The paper reported last week-end on the impending trial of Mrs. Mitchell, and later in the week it reported the not-guilty verdict.  In between, it published an editorial commenting on apparent flaws in the prosecution and the chilling effect it might have on whistle-blowing.  

The first NYT story about these events inspired this blog post on my Legal Ruralism blog, and I was especially intrigued that the story attracted as much attention as it did.  On the day it appeared, it rose as high as number 2 on the "most emailed" list at nytimes.com, and it stayed on the top-10 list for nearly two days.  I attributed the high degree of interest to the broad headline, "Nurse to Stand Trial for Reporting Doctor."  Many doctors and nurses all over country were presumably taking note of this unusual event and sharing the news.  But the New York Times reporting and editorial suggest several ways in which this story is distinctly "rural" or "small-town." In addition to referring to the apparent conflicts of interest, Sack's reporting refers to the "stained reputations" of the nurses and how "heads turn when they walked into local lunch spots."  He also reports the practical difficulties that rural hospitals like that in Winkler County have in attracting and retaining physicians; indeed, Dr. Arafiles came to the hospital in 2008 with a restriction already on his medical license.  The trial was moved to neighboring Andrews County because it "polarized the community."  Finally, the New York Times editorial suggests that "small-town 'justice'" was the problem.  

So, is there really something distinctly "rural" about this story, or could it happen anywhere? Clearly, it could happen anywhere, though I tend to agree with the Times' suggestion that the rural context facilitated this unusual prosecution. 

Rural sociologists and other scholars who write about rural-urban difference have discussed a number of factors apparently at play in these West Texas events.  These include lack of anonymity and conflicts of interest that sometimes result from it; rural disadvantage in terms of access to services such as medical care; a lack of checks and balances in rural local government and a related failure of local government to protect civil rights.  In this case, heightened reputational injury associated with lack of anonymity and the inability of the dismissed nurses to find replacement jobs because of the limited labor market presumably increased the damages they suffered.  This little case out of Kermit, Texas thus illustrates how various characteristics of rural places can be legally relevant in a variety of ways.  Some of the challenges associated with rural lack of anonymity were apparently mitigated by the change of venue.  Whether law and legal actors adequately respond to other challenges associated with rural places--such as those that seem to have aggravated the nurses' damages--may be evident when their case against the various officials is tried or settled.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism Blog.

As you probably know by now, the U.S. Supreme Court recently invalidated certain restrictions on corporations’ participation in campaign finance in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Because I focus on corporate law, a colleague told me I should write an article about this, to which I replied, I did—ten years ago.

I argued there that the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has consistently failed to consider a large business corporation as a complex hierarchical entity.  A decade later, the Court continues to treat a corporation as the equivalent of an individual human speaker under the First Amendment. The Court imagines a corporation as an organization that reflects the will of its constituent individuals.

Citizen United, like past opinions, states in don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it  fashion that shareholders control corporate speech through “corporate democracy."  But the Court has never tried to describe how “corporate democracy” works.  In fact, while shareholders can cast votes in director elections, directors typically run unopposed and it is very difficult for shareholders to nominate alternate candidates. Moreover, directors do not run corporations-CEOs do, and they are appointed by directors, not elected by shareholders.  While shareholders can express discontent with corporate political spending by selling their shares, this is only a kind of after-the-fact punishment, not a method of participation in making political spending choices.

There are certainly some arguments to be made in favor of the petitioners in Citizens United, but “corporate democracy” is not one of them.

If you are interested in hearing more about this issue, Professor Chris Elmendorf and I will participate in a panel discussion on Citizens United in [CORRECTION] King Hall ROOM 2008 at noon on Tuesday, February 9.