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Page Number: 549

388  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Scalia, J., concurring 

privileges,  and  would  probably  have  been  favored  by  most 
of  our  enterprising  Founders—excluding,  perhaps,  Thomas 
Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian so­
ciety.  Moreover,  if  the  Founders’  speciﬁc  intent  with  re­
spect  to  corporations  is  what  matters,  why  does  the  dissent 
ignore  the  Founders’  views  about  other  legal  entities  that 
have  more  in  common  with  modern  business  corporations 
than  the  founding-era  corporations?  At  the  time  of  the 
founding,  religious,  educational,  and  literary  corporations 
were  incorporated  under  general  incorporation  statutes, 
much as business corporations are today.4  See Davis 16–17; 
R.  Seavoy,  Origins  of  the  American  Business  Corporation, 
1784–1855,  p.  5  (1982);  Cooke  94.  There  were  also  small 
unincorporated  business  associations,  which  some  have  ar­
gued  were  the  “ ‘true  progenitors’ ”  of  today’s  business 
corporations.  Friedman  200  (quoting  S.  Livermore,  Early 
American  Land  Companies:  Their  Inﬂuence  on  Corporate 
Development  216  (1939));  see  also  Davis  33.  Were  all  of 
these  silently  excluded  from  the  protections  of  the  First 
Amendment? 

The lack of a textual exception for speech by corporations 
cannot  be  explained  on  the  ground  that  such  organizations 
did  not  exist  or  did  not  speak.  To  the  contrary,  colleges, 
towns  and  cities,  religious  institutions,  and  guilds  had  long 
been organized as corporations at common law and under the 
King’s  charter,  see  1  W.  Blackstone,  Commentaries  on  the 
Laws of England 455–473 (1765); 1 S. Kyd, A Treatise on the 
Law of Corporations 1–32, 63 (1793) (reprinted 2006), and as 

tion under general laws.”  1 W. Fletcher, Cyclopedia of the Law of Corpo­
rations § 2, p. 8 (rev. ed. 2006). 

4 At  times  (though  not  always)  the  dissent  seems  to  exclude  such  non­
“business  corporations”  from  its  denial  of  free-speech  rights.  See  post, 
at 428.  Finding in a seemingly categorical text a distinction between the 
rights of business corporations and the rights of nonbusiness corporations 
is  even more  imaginative than  ﬁnding a  distinction between  the  rights of 
all corporations and the rights of other associations.