Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech Regulation
The Voice Signature - The Legal and Ethical Problems Selected:
Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech Regulation
As a Strategic Communications major, I found this topic to hit close to home. As I learn and prepare to enter the workforce, it’s going to be important to balance marketing, corporate brand messaging, advertising claims, and social media campaigns against regulatory requirements. When we covered the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, and the Mutual Film Corporation doctrine, it was really interesting on the legal definition of “Corporate Personhood”. The idea that companies have the right to support their interest but also have to follow strict regulations against deceptive advertising. I never thought about how much the law would influence marketing within a company. Not only the law, but the ethics, and doing the right thing behind it.
Why I chose the topic -
I didn’t know that there were so many connections through laws and regulations for marketing roles. As I hope to get into a strategic communications position, I’ve learned how important it’s going to be to align the company’s messaging with its goals. Now, understanding corporate personhood and commercial speech regulations are important because they define the boundaries of what can be said legally and how the laws may or may not protect a company. There’s so much more for me to learn about the concept that a company has similar rights as a natural person and that they can speak publicly and lobby for things in their best interest without crossing the line. Although a lot of PR, branding, and social media are protected by the First Amendment, we can only go so far with commercial speech. This is very important for me to know for my future career.
The Stakes, why is this current?
Thinking about companies and how they communicate and represent themselves touches everything across marketing, strategic communications, branding and corporate law. Public perception, how consumers view a company as good or bad, can make or break it. Are they following the laws and regulations and are they ethical? U.S. courts are looking at first amendment issues related to social media for example, trying to determine if big tech companies are contributing to harmful content, algorithms, and ad targeting. In my feeds and on the news, I hear about the U.S. government trying to ban or have someone buy TikTok because it could be harmful and pose security risks. This article Social media giants have First Amendment rights that protect their speech gives some support to the companies point of view. Interestingly, TikTok is banned in other countries (China, India, Afghanistan, Iran,North Korea) and not in the U.S, different countries, different rules and regulations..
Another thing I read and hear about is health officials and lawmakers trying to limit screen time for kids. Big tech companies are pushing back and using their lobbyists to argue that digital tools are essential in the classroom now, everything is the digital age. This viewpoint counters the argument of limiting screen time to it being an important tool in the classroom and even critical in preparing kids for the workforce. Here’s an interesting NBC news report from March 10, 2026, Ed tech industry scrambles to fight a wave of bills to limit screen time in schools.
The Class Connection:
It opened my eyes to know that Strategic Communications is more than sales and marketing campaigns, it’s so many business decisions behind the scenes that have to be within legal boundaries. An obvious connection to the class was the movie Thank you for Smoking which brought these 2 topics, corporate personhood and commercial speech, to life. What were the legal and ethical responsibilities of the company for marketing tobacco products? The protagonist’s philosophy was “That’s the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly you’re never wrong.” As long as it wasn’t deceptive or false, they weren’t wrong. The law was on their side, they didn’t have to add the visual disclaimers. But what left me hanging in the movie, is how the marketing people worked through the advertising and communication pieces.
Prompt Strategy:
My prompt strategy was to use general AI tools to gather information and organize the ideas for the research.
AI tools that were used:
Gemini - general topic & relevance to class search
Consensus - articles search and citations
Google Scholar - articles search and citations
Claude - 400 word article summary
The Search: (actual prompts used)
“Articles about Corporate Speech and the First Amendment”
“Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech in Business”
“Strategic Communications and Company's Constitutional Rights”
“Articles about Modern Marketing, Ethics, and Regulatory Compliance for Corporate Speech”
“Free Speech in Strategic Communications”
“Give examples of Corporate Personhood and speech regulations that are in the news for companies in the last few years.”
“Give examples of how corporate personhood and commercial speech regulation are in the news for social media companies recently”
Claude AI Summary Prompt:
Prompt 1: Write a 400 word summary of the attached articles divided logically into 2 paragraphs. Use bullets and organize by the most common theme. (attempted to combine all articles for 1 consolidated summary)
Here's a 400-word summary of the seven articles, organized around their two dominant themes:
Theme 1: Platform Regulation and the First Amendment's "Inverted" Politics
Several pieces trace how courts and commentators are wrestling with private power over online speech in the wake of Moody v. NetChoice, Murthy v. Missouri, and Lindke v. Freed:
Eugene Volokh's Free Speech and Private Power argues the Court left the platform-regulation question mostly unresolved: it strongly protected platforms' curatorial discretion over "curated" feeds, while leaving open whether direct messaging, account/post removal, net neutrality, and content-based (but viewpoint-neutral) access rules could still be regulated. He also examines Murthy's unresolved line between permissible government persuasion and unconstitutional coercion of platforms, and defends Lindke's protection of officials' personal social-media curation.
Nelson Tebbe's First Amendment Inversion documents how conservative and liberal legal camps have swapped traditional positions: movement conservatives now embrace common-carrier and antidiscrimination theories once associated with the left to justify regulating "Big Tech," while mainstream liberals now defend platforms' editorial discretion using arguments once used to shield newspapers and parade organizers—an asymmetric realignment he finds echoed in campus speech-code and antisemitism/Title VI debates.
A Taylor & Francis comparative-law article extends this to transatlantic commercial defamation and platform liability, examining how U.S. and EU regimes balance free expression, market fairness, and unfair-competition law in digital markets.
Theme 2: Corporate Speech Rights and Compelled Disclosure
A second cluster examines whether and why corporations possess First Amendment speech (and silence) rights:
Sean Griffith's Corporate Speech and Corporate Purpose uses the SEC's shareholder-proposal rule (Rule 14a-8) to argue that corporations' negative right to remain silent should be grounded in "corporate purpose"—meaning compelled speech is permissible only when consistent with shareholder wealth maximization, making mandated disclosure on social/political matters constitutionally suspect.
A Maryland Law Review article (Vol. 84, Iss. 4) similarly critiques the expansion of corporate political-speech rights from Bellotti through Citizens United, arguing this doctrinal line—invoked in ESG and "politically correct" corporate-activism debates—was a mistake, tracing the narrower original scope of commercial-speech protection from Valentine v. Chrestensen onward.
A Wiley/Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management bibliometric study takes a different, non-legal angle: it maps 25+ years of CSR "brand transparency" scholarship, identifying thematic clusters around supply-chain visibility and reputation management rather than constitutional doctrine—loosely connecting to the same corporate-accountability terrain from a management-research perspective.
Accuracy Audit: While the summary identified 2 main themes, I didn’t feel it captured the items most relevant to corporate personhood and commercial speech. The 400 word summary across 6 articles limited the references from so many different sources.
Prompt 2: Write a 400 word summary of the attached articles divided logically into 2 paragraphs focusing on the concepts of Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech Regulation. Use bullets and organize by the most common theme. (attempted to combine all articles for 1 consolidated summary)
Based on these law review articles, here's a 400-word summary organized around the two core themes:
Corporate Personhood
The foundational tension across these articles is whether corporations, as "artificial" rather than natural persons, can claim the same First Amendment protections as individuals. Griffith frames this starkly: while First Amendment jurisprudence relies on both intrinsic rationales rooted in natural rights (often thought inapplicable to corporations) and instrumental rationales tied to self-governance, the negative right to remain silent strains this framework because silence "does nothing to improve the quality of democratic deliberation."
Scholars trace a doctrinal line from early recognition of corporate rights through landmark cases. Griffith notes that corporate First Amendment rights trace back to the 1930s–40s, with cases addressing election-related corporate speech beginning in 1978's Bellotti and reaffirmed in Citizens United (2010), while corporate rights cases continued through 2014 and 2023.
A key doctrinal debate is whether corporate rights are "derivative" of shareholders' natural rights or something more independent. Griffith argues that for publicly traded corporations, the diversity of shareholder interests forces corporate law to adopt a presumptive purpose—wealth maximization—which serves as a stand-in "conscience," providing a basis for limiting compelled speech to matters consistent with that purpose.
Winkler's historical work pushes back on personhood as the central driver, contending that corporate personhood has not played as central a role in shaping corporate speech rights as often believed, and that corporations actually hold at least four distinct, inconsistently-reasoned speech rights rather than one unified right. seattleu
Piety connects this to a broader political narrative, describing what she calls a "corporate civil rights movement" using First Amendment doctrine as a deregulatory tool, tracing back to Reconstruction-era Fourteenth Amendment litigation.
Commercial Speech Regulation
Griffith traces the doctrine's origins to explicit denial of protection: in 1942's Valentine v. Chrestensen, the Supreme Court held the Constitution imposed no restraint on regulating "purely commercial advertising," a position reversed only in 1976's Virginia Board case, with the modern intermediate-scrutiny test established in Central Hudson (1980).
Compelled commercial speech is a growing flashpoint, illustrated by SEC shareholder-proposal rules, which Griffith argues compel corporations to publish social-policy resolutions that may violate free-speech "integrity" principles when the content doesn't serve wealth-maximizing purposes.
Volokh's analysis of Moody v. NetChoice shows commercial speech categorization is unsettled even for disclosure mandates, noting the Court signaled that platform disclosure rules must satisfy Zauderer's commercial-speech framework, but that framework's traditional link to "commercial advertising" doesn't cleanly map onto today's ad-free user relationships, creating doctrinal uncertainty lower courts may not fully register.
Scholars like Bunting further refine categories, distinguishing "pure political" from commercial corporate speech to determine which deserves heightened protection versus regulatory latitude.
Accuracy Audit: after attempting to do it across all 6 articles, I revised the prompt to look more specifically for key takeaways related to corporate personhood and commercial speech. This one resulted in a better summary across the available articles. However, it’s best to assess by individual article.
Individual Article Summaries:
PROMPT USED FOR EACH ARTICLE: Write a 400 word, 2 paragraph, summary of the attached article focusing on the concepts of Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech Regulation. Use bullets and organize by the most relevant context
Article 1 Summary: Platform liability, free speech, and market fairness: transatlantic legal responses to commercial defamation and digital competition
U.S. Approach: Corporate Speech Rights and Litigation-Driven Enforcement
The article treats corporations as rights-bearing entities whose reputational and speech interests receive robust protection, most visibly through the actual malice standard from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which requires public figures to prove knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth to win defamation claims, setting a high bar for liability.
This protection was extended in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., which held that statements framed as opinions can still be actionable if they imply verifiable false facts, reinforcing that corporate reputational interests are legally cognizable even against speech dressed as commentary.
On the commercial speech regulation side, the authors point to POM Wonderful LLC v. Coca-Cola Co. and Lexmark International v. Static Control Components as reinforcing corporate rights to protect brand reputation, ensuring broader enforcement against deceptive trade practices and lowering procedural barriers for businesses seeking legal remedies for unfair competition.
Companies enforce these rights primarily through private litigation under the Lanham Act, directly challenging misleading commercial practices in court rather than relying on regulatory oversight.
Platform-level speech protections compound this: Section 230 affords broad immunity to platforms for third-party content, reflecting a strong free speech foundation. Taylor & Francis Online
EU Approach: Regulatory Oversight and Consumer/Market Protection
In contrast to the U.S.'s litigation-centered model, the European model relies more on regulatory agencies to adjudicate unfair competition disputes, positioning corporate commercial speech as subject to proactive administrative constraint rather than court-tested rights.
The EU's Digital Services Act mandates accountability measures requiring platforms to actively monitor and mitigate harmful content, embodying a balanced approach to reputation protection and freedom of expression, a sharp departure from the U.S. immunity model. Taylor & Francis Online
Empirically, the authors note that 63% of EU unfair competition cases in 2022 stemmed from fake reviews, underscoring the need for coordinated global enforcement, and cite tools like the DSA's algorithmic transparency provisions and the U.S. FTC's guidelines on influencer marketing as positive but fragmented steps. Taylor & Francis OnlineTaylor & Francis Online
The paper ultimately argues for a hybrid governance model blending U.S. litigation-driven accountability with the EU's preventive regulatory infrastructure to reconcile corporate speech rights with market fairness across jurisdictions.
Accuracy Audit: this article had high value for several specific reference cases. The INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF LAW, COMPUTERS & TECHNOLOGY seems to be a credible source, and was an easily accessible published article in a PDF format. The summary also did a nice comparison between the United States, and European regulations. The reference date on this is January 2025.
Article 2 Summary: FREE SPEECH AND PRIVATE POWER
Corporations as First Amendment speakers (the "personhood"-adjacent theme):
The core of Moody v. NetChoice affirms that private corporate entities — social media platforms — enjoy the same editorial/curatorial speech rights as newspapers and parade organizers when compiling third-party content into a "single speech product."
This corporate speech right holds even when the entity wields enormous influence over public discourse; Justice Alito's concurrence questioned whether that scale should matter, but the majority rejected size as disqualifying.
Justice Barrett flagged open questions about whether algorithmic or AI-driven curation — where no human is actually exercising editorial judgment — still counts as protected corporate "expression," a live doctrinal fault line for future cases.
The article notes courts must do function-by-function analysis (per Justice Jackson) rather than treat an entire corporate category as categorically expressive or non-expressive — curating a news feed differs from routing direct messages, even within the same corporate platform.
Corporations can still be compelled to host others' speech (as in PruneYard and Rumsfeld) when doing so doesn't alter the company's own expressive product — showing corporate speech rights are functional, not absolute.
Commercial speech regulation:
The article discusses Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, the commercial-speech disclosure precedent, which Moody invoked to let states require "purely factual and uncontroversial" disclosures from platforms.
Volokh flags a doctrinal tension: Zauderer's original rationale was tied to disclosures within commercial advertising, yet Moody's disclosure mandates apply broadly to platform-user relationships where no money changes hands — arguably stretching commercial speech doctrine beyond its traditional bounds.
He notes some Justices (in NIFLA v. Becerra) were even open to applying Zauderer-style disclosure rules to nonprofit, non-commercially-motivated speakers, suggesting further erosion of the line between commercial and noncommercial speech regulation.
Lower courts are already split — the Ninth Circuit's NetChoice v. Bonta declined to apply Zauderer where a law "regulates far more than mere commercial speech."
Accuracy Audit: Harvard Law Review would be considered a leading scholar, and thus a high-value source. This published report included case references, First Amendment and regulation references. The summary directly covers the topics of First Amendment as it relates to personhood and Commercial Speech. This was a good reference piece. Assuming it is recent because some of the footnotes have references of 2024.
Article 3 Summary: First Amendment Inversion
First Amendment Inversion: Corporate Personhood & Commercial Speech Regulation
Nelson Tebbe's article traces how political camps have swapped positions on two doctrines central to speech-host cases—corporate personhood and commercial speech regulation—using the Moody v. NetChoice platform litigation as its central case study.
On Corporate Personhood:
Under the older conservative paradigm, corporations (newspapers, cable operators, utilities) received full First Amendment protection as "speakers," regardless of their market power, drawing on cases like Tornillo, Hurley, and PG&E.
In Moody, conservative Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch broke from this by arguing platforms like Facebook and YouTube were not engaged in genuine editorial expression, but were mere conduits — a position historically associated with liberal jurisprudence (e.g., PruneYard).
Justice Kagan's majority opinion, joined by liberal and moderate conservative Justices, instead affirmed that platforms' content-moderation choices constitute protected "editorial discretion," extending robust corporate personhood protections consistent with the traditional conservative view.
Justice Thomas exemplifies the inversion most starkly: he once defended cable companies' editorial discretion as protected corporate speech, but in Moody argued platforms were simply speech conduits subject to regulation.
On Commercial Speech Regulation:
Florida and Texas defended their platform laws using the common-carrier framework—treating dominant commercial platforms like telephone companies or shippers, obligated to carry messages nondiscriminately due to their "public interest" function and market power.
This argument, once anathema to conservatives who favored a "laissez-faire" model (per Justice Kavanaugh's earlier ISP opinion), was newly embraced by movement conservatives to justify regulating "Big Tech."
Conversely, the platforms and mainstream liberal jurists rejected the common-carrier analogy and market-power justifications, arguing (via Sorrell v. Vermont and similar precedent) that government cannot "burden the speech of others to tilt public debate," regardless of a company's commercial dominance.
An amicus brief from progressive law professors attempted to preserve egalitarian consistency by invoking PruneYard to argue commercial spaces open to the public can be subject to nondiscrimination rules—though this created tension since platforms' moderation policies (banning hate speech, misinformation) already served egalitarian ends.
Overall, Tebbe argues this inversion is asymmetrical: movement conservatives face greater doctrinal strain reconciling new support for corporate/commercial speech regulation with prior laissez-faire commitments, while mainstream liberals experience less friction, since defending corporate speech rights and skepticism toward market-redistribution regulation were already consistent with older liberal positions in select contexts.
Accuracy Audit: This article is published by Texas Law Review. They could be considered a high-value source. The information is current, as it was published within the last two years (2024). I found this article very easy to follow, and the summary did an excellent job of describing the political views through the case of Moody v. NetChoice, and how different Supreme Court justices view it.
Article 4 Summary: CORPORATE SPEECH AND CORPORATE PURPOSE: A THEORY OF CORPORATE FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS
Corporate Personhood
The doctrinal starting point: It's now settled that corporations have First Amendment rights, but whether those rights are fully coequal to natural persons' rights remains unresolved.
Two rationales for speech rights: Free speech is justified by an intrinsic rationale (autonomy, natural rights of persons) and an instrumental rationale (speech's value to democratic self-governance and informed decision-making). These are unified in natural persons but diverge for corporations.
The problem with the intrinsic rationale: Because corporations are artificial entities without an "interior life" or conscience, the intrinsic rationale seems inapplicable to them — this is especially damaging for negative speech rights (the right to stay silent), which courts have grounded almost entirely in individual conscience.
Griffith's proposed solution — "corporate purpose": Rather than locating rights in the corporate entity itself, Griffith traces speech rights back to the shareholders who form the corporation, who don't forfeit their natural rights by incorporating. The scope of protection then depends on how much shared purpose exists among shareholders:
Sole shareholder / closely-held firms: broad speech rights, since owner interests align closely with corporate action.
Publicly traded corporations: the shareholder base is diverse and conflict-prone, narrowing the presumptive shared purpose to a single objective — shareholder wealth maximization, which Griffith calls the corporation's functional "conscience."
Key cases shaping personhood doctrine: First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) first extended speech protection to non-media corporations for political speech; Citizens United v. FEC (2010) reaffirmed that political speech doesn't lose protection based on corporate source; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) extended rights derivatively from the human owners of closely-held firms — illustrating that corporate rights are generally treated as "derivative" of the people behind them.
Commercial Speech Regulation
Historical arc: Commercial speech was originally unprotected — Valentine v. Chrestensen (1942) held the Constitution imposed no restraint on regulating "purely commercial advertising."
The reversal: Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976) extended First Amendment protection to commercial speech, justified instrumentally by its value to consumers making economic decisions — analogized to political speech's value to voters.
The governing test: Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission (1980) established intermediate scrutiny: regulation must advance a substantial government interest, directly advance it, and be no more extensive than necessary.
Application to securities law: Griffith frames SEC disclosure rules (like the shareholder proposal rule, Rule 14a-8) as a form of commercial speech regulation, arguing this framing helps explain why First Amendment challenges to securities regulation are only now maturing as a legal question.
Accuracy Audit: The Journal of Free Speech Law appears to be a high-value source. The content was published in 2024. It is part of a much larger research as this is an excerpt of pages 443 - 510 available in a PDF format. The summary really seems to have the most direct content connection to the class topics. The summary was easy to read and follow.
Article 5 Summary: Silencing Corporate Political Speech
Corporate Personhood
Bunting's article works from the premise that corporations, as legal persons, engage in speech that can be sorted along two axes: commercial vs. non-commercial and political vs. non-political — producing a four-part taxonomy rather than the traditional binary "commercial/political" split.
Within this taxonomy, Bunting isolates a category of "pure political speech" — corporate expression on moral or public-policy questions unrelated to the company's actual business operations.
The article's central normative claim is that corporate personhood should not be read to entitle corporations to engage in pure political speech: as market-based entities, corporations should not shape public views of "right and wrong" or policy positions outside their commercial function.
Rather than challenging this directly under First Amendment doctrine (where corporate personhood has generally been affirmed, e.g., in cases like Citizens United), Bunting proposes a state corporate law workaround: using shareholder oppression doctrine to argue that a corporation's pure political speech can constitute a breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders, sidestepping the business judgment rule that typically shields corporate decision-making from judicial second-guessing.
Commercial Speech Regulation
The taxonomy's commercial/non-commercial axis situates the article within the long-standing doctrinal debate over how much First Amendment protection commercial speech deserves relative to political speech (a distinction rooted in cases like Valentine v. Chrestensen and Virginia Pharmacy Board).
By contrast with commercial speech (advertising, business-related statements), Bunting treats political speech by corporations — especially "pure" political speech untethered to business operations — as the category most in need of restriction.
The article's proposed remedy operates through corporate governance and fiduciary law rather than direct commercial speech regulation, reflecting an argument that existing First Amendment protections for corporate speech make direct regulatory bans difficult, so litigation-based, internal corporate law tools are a more viable path to constraining political (not commercial) speech.
This approach implicitly preserves protections for genuine commercial speech while narrowing the space in which corporations can claim speech rights for non-commercial, ideological, or policy-driven expression.
Accuracy Audit: This is an excerpt from Maryland Law Review which could be considered a leading scholar source. The PDF format is an excerpt of pages 867 - 924 with a copyright version noted for 2025. Way too much legal jargon for me to digest. The summary gets more into how companies engage in political speech. I’m not clear from the summary of the direct connection to commercial speech.
Article 6 Summary: The Evolution of Corporate Personhood
Corporate Personhood: Origins and Expansion
Corporate personhood began as a practical legal fiction rather than a claim of literal equivalence between corporations and individuals. Key developments include:
Early foundations: In Bank of United States v. Deveaux (1809) and Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Chief Justice Marshall framed corporations as "artificial beings" possessing only rights necessary for functional existence—entering contracts, owning property, suing and being sued—justified by protecting the real interests of human shareholders behind them.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886): Though the Court never formally ruled on the issue, an unofficial headnote recording Chief Justice Waite's pretrial remark—that corporations fall under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause—became the de facto precedent for corporate constitutional rights, later formalized in Pembina (1888).
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014): Extended personhood into religious liberty, ruling that closely-held for-profit corporations can exercise RFRA-protected religious beliefs, over Justice Ginsburg's dissent warning of an "expansive notion of corporate personhood."
Commercial Speech and Political Expenditure Regulation
A parallel line of cases addressed whether corporations possess First Amendment speech rights, particularly regarding political spending:
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978): Established that political speech is protected "indispensable" discourse regardless of whether it comes from a corporation or individual, striking down a Massachusetts law restricting corporate spending on ballot initiatives—over Rehnquist's dissent warning that corporations' unique economic advantages (limited liability, perpetual life) pose distinct political dangers.
Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990): Upheld restrictions on corporate independent expenditures, citing the compelling government interest in preventing corruption from concentrated corporate wealth.
Citizens United v. FEC (2010): Overturned Austin, ruling that restricting independent political expenditures violates the First Amendment regardless of speaker identity, enabling the creation of "super PACs." Justice Stevens's dissent argued corporations are not part of "We the People" and that unrestricted spending compromises dissenting shareholders' own political views.
The article argues these two threads are conceptually distinct but often conflated: corporate personhood as a practical necessity (contracts, property, lawsuits) is defensible, while its extension into unlimited political spending and religious exemption represents a more contestable expansion—one that provoked significant public backlash, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Move to Amend campaign.
Accuracy Audit: This scholarly source is from Cornell Undergraduate Law & Society Review, content published Spring 2025. accessible in HTML format. The summary seems to have content related to the research topics of Corporate Personhood and Commercial Speech. A few court cases were mentioned.
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Articles
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13600869.2025.2516967?needAccess=true
de Almeida Leite, E. M., & Ramos Leite, M. A. (2025). Platform liability, free speech, and market fairness: Transatlantic legal responses to commercial defamation and digital competition. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2025.2516967
Volokh, E. (2024). Free speech and private power. Harvard Law Review Forum, 138, 43–65. https://granitestatereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/138-Harv.-L.-Rev.-F.-43.pdf
Tebbe, N. (2026). First Amendment inversion. Texas Law Review, 104(3). https://texaslawreview.org/first-amendment-inversion/
Griffith, S. J. (2024). Corporate speech and corporate purpose: A theory of corporate First Amendment rights. Journal of Free Speech Law, 5(3), 441–510. https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/griffith.pdf
https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4034&context=mlr
Bunting, W. C. (2024). Silencing corporate political speech. Maryland Law Review, 84(4), Article 4. https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol84/iss4/4
Rights Without Agency: Corporate Personhood and Democratic Erosion
Carey, R. (2025). Rights without agency: Corporate personhood and democratic erosion. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6004017
Schmaling, M. (2025). The evolution of corporate personhood. Cornell Undergraduate Law & Society Review. https://www.culsr.org/articles/the-evolution-of-corporate-personhood
APA Citations/Sources:
TikTok v. Garland (2025) https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/tiktok-v-garland/#
Vile, J. R. (2025, January 23). TikTok v. Garland (2025). The First Amendment Encyclopedia. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/tiktok-v-garland/
Allyn, B. (2024, August 9). Social media giants say they have First Amendment rights that protect their speech. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/09/nx-s1-5057612/social-media-giants-say-they-have-first-amendment-rights-that-protect-their-speech
Reader, R. (2025, November 24). The classroom tech backlash. Politico. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/11/24/the-classroom-tech-backlash-00667115
Kingkade, T. (2026, March 10). Ed tech industry scrambles to fight a wave of bills to limit screen time in schools. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/education-technology-industry-scrambles-bills-limit-screen-time-school-rcna261339
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