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430  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Opinion of Stevens, J. 

As a matter of original expectations, then, it seems absurd 
to  think  that  the  First  Amendment  prohibits  legislatures 
from taking into account the corporate identity of a sponsor 
of  electoral  advocacy.  As  a  matter  of  original  meaning,  it 
likewise  seems  baseless—unless  one  evaluates  the  First 
Amendment’s “principles,” ante, at 319, 363, or its “purpose,” 
ante,  at 376  (opinion of  Roberts,  C. J.),  at such  a high  level 
of  generality  that  the  historical  understandings  of  the 
Amendment cease to be a meaningful constraint on the judi­
cial task.  This case sheds a revelatory light on the assump­
tion of some that an impartial judge’s application of an origi­
nalist  methodology  is  likely  to  yield  more  determinate 
answers,  or  to  play  a  more  decisive  role  in  the  decisional 
process, than his or her views about sound policy. 

Justice Scalia criticizes the foregoing discussion for fail­
ing to adduce statements from the founding era showing that 
corporations were understood to be excluded from the First 
Amendment’s free speech guarantee.  Ante, at 386, 393.  Of 
course,  Justice  Scalia  adduces  no  statements  to  suggest 
the  contrary  proposition,  or  even  to  suggest  that  the  con­
trary  proposition  better  reﬂects  the  kind  of  right  that  the 
drafters and ratiﬁers of the Free Speech Clause thought they 
were  enshrining.  Although  Justice  Scalia  makes  a  per­
fectly  sensible  argument  that  an  individual’s  right  to  speak 
entails  a  right  to  speak  with  others  for  a  common  cause, 
cf.  MCFL,  479  U. S.  238,  he  does  not  explain  why  those  two 
rights  must  be  precisely  identical,  or  why  that  principle  ap­
plies  to  electioneering  by  corporations  that  serve  no  “com­
mon cause.”  Ante, at 392.  Nothing in his account dislodges 
my basic point that members of the founding generation held 
a  cautious  view  of  corporate  power  and  a  narrow  view  of 
corporate rights (not that they “despised” corporations, ante, 
at 386), and that they conceptualized speech in individualistic 
terms.  If no  prominent Framer bothered  to articulate that 
corporate  speech  would  have  lesser  status  than  individual 
speech, that may well be because the contrary proposition—