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392  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Scalia, J., concurring 

men  and  women—not,  for  example,  of  trees  or  polar  bears. 
But the individual person’s right to speak includes the right 
to  speak  in  association  with  other  individual  persons. 
Surely  the  dissent  does  not  believe  that  speech  by  the  Re­
publican Party or the Democratic Party can be censored be­
cause it is not the speech of “an individual American.”  It is 
the  speech  of  many  individual  Americans,  who  have  associ­
ated  in  a  common  cause,  giving  the  leadership  of  the  party 
the  right  to  speak  on  their  behalf.  The  association  of  indi­
viduals in a business corporation is no different—or at least 
it  cannot  be  denied  the  right  to  speak  on  the  simplistic 
ground that it is not “an individual American.” 7 

But to return to, and summarize, my principal point, which 
is  the  conformity  of  today’s  opinion  with  the  original  mean­
ing of the First Amendment.  The Amendment is written in 
terms of “speech,” not speakers.  Its text offers no foothold 

7 The  dissent  says  that  “ ‘speech’ ”  refers  to  oral  communications  of 
human  beings,  and  since  corporations  are  not  human  beings  they  cannot 
speak.  Post, at 428, n. 55.  This is sophistry.  The authorized spokesman 
of  a  corporation  is  a  human  being,  who  speaks  on  behalf  of  the  human 
beings  who  have  formed  that  association—just  as  the  spokesman  of  an 
unincorporated  association  speaks  on  behalf  of  its  members.  The  power 
to  publish  thoughts,  no  less  than  the  power  to  speak  thoughts,  belongs 
only to human beings, but the dissent sees no problem with a corporation’s 
enjoying the freedom of the press. 

The  same  footnote  asserts  that  “it  has  been  ‘claimed  that  the  notion  of 
institutional  speech  .  .  .  did  not  exist  in  post-revolutionary  America.’ ” 
This  is  quoted  from  a  law-review  article  by  a  Bigelow  Fellow  at  the  Uni­
versity of Chicago (Fagundes, State Actors as First Amendment Speakers, 
100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1637, 1654 (2006)), which offers as the sole support for 
its statement a treatise dealing with government speech, M. Yudof, When 
Government  Speaks  42–50  (1983).  The  cited  pages  of  that  treatise  pro­
vide no support whatever for the statement—unless, as seems overwhelm­
ingly  likely,  the  “institutional  speech”  referred  to  was  speech  by  the 
subject of the law-review article, governmental institutions. 

The other authority cited in the footnote, a law-review article by a pro­
fessor at Washington and Lee Law School, Bezanson, Institutional Speech, 
80  Iowa  L.  Rev.  735,  775  (1995),  in  fact  contradicts  the  dissent,  in  that  it 
would accord free-speech protection to associations.