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428  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Opinion of Stevens, J. 

The  Framers  thus  took  it  as  a  given  that  corporations 
could  be  comprehensively  regulated  in  the  service  of  the 
public  welfare.  Unlike  our  colleagues,  they  had  little  trou­
ble  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.55  While individuals might 
join together to exercise their speech rights, business corpo­
rations,  at  least,  were  plainly  not  seen  as  facilitating  such 
associational  or  expressive  ends.  Even  “the  notion  that 
business  corporations  could  invoke  the  First  Amendment 
would  probably  have  been  quite  a  novelty,”  given  that  “at 
the  time,  the  legitimacy  of  every  corporate  activity  was 
thought  to  rest  entirely  in  a  concession  of  the  sovereign.” 
Shelledy, Autonomy, Debate, and Corporate Speech, 18 Has­
tings Const. L. Q. 541, 578 (1991); cf. Trustees of Dartmouth 
College  v.  Woodward,  4  Wheat.  518,  636  (1819)  (Marshall, 

55 In normal usage then, as now, the term “speech” referred to oral com­
munications  by  individuals.  See,  e. g.,  2  S.  Johnson,  Dictionary  of  the 
English  Language  1853–1854  (4th  ed.  1773)  (reprinted  1978)  (listing  as 
primary  deﬁnition  of  “speech”:  “The  power  of  articulate  utterance;  the 
power  of  expressing  thoughts  by  vocal  words”);  2  N.  Webster,  American 
Dictionary of the English Language (1828) (reprinted 1970) (listing as pri­
mary  deﬁnition  of  “speech”:  “The  faculty  of  uttering  articulate  sounds  or 
words,  as  in  human  beings;  the  faculty  of  expressing  thoughts  by  words 
or  articulate  sounds.  Speech  was  given  to  man  by  his  Creator  for  the 
noblest purposes”).  Indeed, it has been “claimed that the notion of insti­
tutional speech . . . did not  exist in post-revolutionary America.”  Fagun­
des, State Actors as First Amendment Speakers, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1637, 
1654 (2006);  see also  Bezanson, Institutional  Speech, 80  Iowa L.  Rev. 735, 
775 (1995) (“In the intellectual heritage of the eighteenth century, the idea 
that free speech was individual and personal was deeply rooted and clearly 
manifest in the writings of Locke, Milton, and others on whom the framers 
of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights drew”).  Given that corporations 
were conceived of as artiﬁcial entities and do not have the technical capac­
ity  to  “speak,”  the  burden  of  establishing  that  the  Framers  and  ratiﬁers 
understood  “the  freedom  of  speech”  to  encompass  corporate  speech  is, 
I believe, far heavier than the majority acknowledges.