Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Page Number: 548

Cite as: 558 U. S. 310 (2010) 

387 

Scalia, J., concurring 

leading.  Post, at 426, n.  53.  There were approximately 335 
charters issued to business corporations in the United States 
by  the  end  of  the  18th  century.2  See  2  J.  Davis,  Essays  in 
the Earlier  History of American  Corporations 24  (1917) (re­
printed 2006) (hereinafter Davis).  This was a “considerable 
extension  of  corporate  enterprise  in  the  ﬁeld  of  business,” 
id.,  at  8,  and  represented  “unprecedented  growth,”  id.,  at 
309.  Moreover,  what  seems  like  a  small  number  by  today’s 
standards surely does not indicate the relative importance of 
corporations when the Nation was considerably smaller.  As 
I have previously noted, “[b]y the end of the eighteenth cen­
tury  the  corporation  was  a  familiar  ﬁgure  in  American  eco­
nomic  life.”  McConnell  v.  Federal  Election  Comm’n,  540 
U. S. 93, 256 (2003) (Scalia, J., concurring in part, concurring 
in  judgment  in  part,  and  dissenting  in  part)  (quoting  C. 
Cooke,  Corporation  Trust  and  Company  92  (1951)  (herein­
after Cooke); internal quotation marks omitted). 

Even  if  we  thought  it  proper  to  apply  the  dissent’s  ap­
proach  of  excluding  from  First  Amendment  coverage  what 
the Founders disliked, and even if we agreed that the Found­
ers  disliked  founding-era  corporations,  modern  corporations 
might  not  qualify  for  exclusion.  Most  of  the  Founders’  re­
sentment  toward  corporations  was  directed  at  the  state-
granted monopoly privileges that individually chartered cor­
porations  enjoyed.3  Modern  corporations  do  not  have  such 

2 The dissent protests that 1791 rather than 1800 should be the relevant 
date,  and  that  “[m]ore  than  half  of  the  century’s  total  business  charters 
were  issued  between  1796  and  1800.”  Post,  at  426,  n.  53.  I  used  1800 
only because the dissent did.  But in any case, it is surely fanciful to think 
that  a  consensus  of  hostility  toward  corporations  was  transformed  into 
general favor at some magical moment between 1791 and 1796. 

3 “[P]eople  in  1800  identiﬁed  corporations  with  franchised  monopolies.” 
L.  Friedman,  A  History  of  American  Law  194  (2d  ed.  1985)  (hereinafter 
Friedman).  “The  chief  cause  for  the  changed  popular  attitude  towards 
business  corporations  that  marked  the  opening  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  the  elimination  of  their  inherent  monopolistic  character.  This  was 
accomplished primarily by an extension of the principle of free incorpora­