Originalist or Original: The Difficulties of Reconciling Citizens United with Corporate Law History

Leo E. Strine, Jr.* & Nicholas Walter**

Much has and will continue to be written about the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.¹ In that decision, the Court held that the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the “McCain-Feingold Act”) that prohibited corporations from making expenditures expressly in favor of the election or defeat of political candidates, except through corporate-sponsored political action committees that raised specific funds for that purpose, was unconstitutional as applied to the nonprofit advocacy corporation before the Court.² In its sweeping ruling, the Court suggested that the managers of even for-profit corporations whose shares are publicly traded have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of treasury funds to influence the political process, including to advocate the election or defeat of particular candidates for office.

In this Article, we focus on a specific question raised by Citizens United, which is whether the Supreme Court’s decision can be justified solely by application of the originalist method of constitutional interpretation, or whether it can only be explained by giving substantial weight to a more modern, evolved understanding of the relevant constitutional provisions. The dissent in Citizens United, authored by Justice Stevens and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, argued that the decision could not be defended on originalist grounds. In Justice Stevens’s view, the Framers “had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.”³ In a concurring opinion, originalist Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Alito and in relevant part by Justice Thomas, claimed that the majority’s result was faithful to originalism as they articulate it.⁴ Justice Scalia argued that there was no historical evidence that the government could restrict the speech of business corporations.

In addressing this subject, we acknowledge that Justices Scalia and Alito concurred in the majority opinion, an opinion that itself did not rely upon the originalist methodology, and that the originalist concurrence was crafted as a rebuttal to Justice Stevens’s dissent, which argued that the majority opinion was unhistorical. Nevertheless, because Justices Scalia and Thomas, and originalist methodology, have such influence in current jurisprudence, we believe it is important to consider whether Citizens United can be rationalized on originalist grounds. After all, originalists claim that their method is the only method faithful to the idea that the law is something determinable as the work of certain legitimately empowered authorities, and not whatever the current group of judges decides to say it is.

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© 2016 Leo E. Strine, Jr. & Nicholas Walter. Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Article in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the author, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

*Chief Justice, Delaware Supreme Court; Adjunct Professor, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Austin Wakeman Scott Lecturer, Harvard Law School; Senior Fellow, Harvard Program on Corporate Governance; Adjunct Professor, Vanderbilt University School of Law; Henry Crown Fellow, Aspen Institute.

**Associate, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The authors are grateful for the invaluable assistance of Elane Boulden, Andrew Berni, Dorothy Shapiro, and Sonia Steinway, and for helpful comments from Bill Allen, Bill Bratton, Bill Budinger, Robert Clark, Jill Fisch, Ronald Gilson, Jeff Gordon, Joe Grundfest, Larry Hamermesh, Jonathan Lipson, Ian Nussbaum, Miguel Padro, Alan Palmiter, Ed Rock, Lynn Stout, and Eric Talley.

1 558 U.S. 310 (2010). For a review of the literature spawned by Citizens United, see generally Robert C. Post, Citizens Divided: Campaign Finance Reform and the Constitution (2014); Leo E. Strine, Jr. & Nicholas Walter, Conservative Collision Course?: The Tension Between Conservative Corporate Law Theory and Citizens United, 100 Cornell L. Rev. 335 (2015). Various authors have briefly criticized Citizens United in originalist terms. See, e.g., Joseph F. Morrissey, A Contractarian Critique of Citizens United, 15 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 765, 780–84 (2013) (criticizing Justice Scalia’s originalism); Geoffrey R. Stone, Citizens United and Conservative Judicial Activism, 2012 U. Ill. L. Rev. 485, 497 (“[A]ny Justice attempting seriously to employ an originalist analysis in Citizens United would also have had to uphold the legislation.”); Amanda D. Johnson, Comment, Originalism and Citizens United: The Struggle of Corporate Personhood, 7 Rutgers Bus. L.J. 187 (2010). We provide a comprehensive critique. The most detailed treatments of this topic of which we are aware are Ruth H. Bloch & Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment (2014) (unpublished manuscript) (on file with author), and Ian Speir, Corporations, the Original Understanding, and the Problem of Power, 10 Geo. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 115, (2012). As the title of their excellent essay suggests, Bloch and Lamoreaux focus on developments in the 1860s and after. Our analysis starts earlier, but we are indebted to them.

2 See 2 U.S.C. § 441b(a) (2006) (“It is unlawful for . . . any corporation . . . or any labor organization, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any [federal] election . . . or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any of the foregoing offices . . . .”).

3 Citizens United, 558 U.S. at 428 (Stevens, J., dissenting).

4 Id. at 385–93 (Scalia, J., concurring).