Opinion ID: 201756
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Freedom of Association Claim.

Text: 54 W & S strives to persuade us that the challenged statutes, by directly and indirectly prohibiting the holders of Class A liquor licenses from engaging in franchise relationships, impinge on its First Amendment right to associate with its franchisees for the purposes of joint advertising and development of common management and marketing strategies. We are not convinced. 55 The Supreme Court long has recognized that freedom of speech embraces the freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas. NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, 460, 78 S.Ct. 1163, 2 L.Ed.2d 1488 (1958). This freedom of expressive association emerges from the insight that expressive rights explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment could not be vigorously protected from interference by the State unless a correlative freedom to engage in group effort toward those ends were not also guaranteed. Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 622, 104 S.Ct. 3244, 82 L.Ed.2d 462 (1984). Because protection of the right to associate evolves from the First Amendment's guarantees of speech, assembly, petition, and free exercise, the scope of protection for association corresponds to the constitutional solicitude afforded to the mode of First Amendment expression in which a particular group seeks collectively to engage. See id. 56 It follows logically that, in a free speech case, an association's expressive purpose may pertain to a wide array of ends (including economic ends), see id., but the embedded associational right protects only collective speech and expressive conduct in pursuit of those ends; it does not cover concerted action that lacks an expressive purpose, see City of Dallas v. Stanglin, 490 U.S. 19, 24-25, 109 S.Ct. 1591, 104 L.Ed.2d 18 (1989). So viewed, the right to expressive association does not confer a generalized freedom for individuals or entities collectively to engage in activity that is otherwise regulable when undertaken by a single individual or entity. See id. As one treatise has noted, [t]he Court has tended to view the right of association as dependent on underlying individual rights of expression; there is no right of association in the abstract. Kathleen M. Sullivan & Gerald Gunther, Constitutional Law 1337 (14th ed.2001). Thus, W & S must demonstrate that sections 3-5-11 and 3-5-11.1 unduly curtail its associational right to engage in activities protected by the First Amendment. Elsewise, it cannot prevail on its associational claim. 57 We already have explained why section 3-5-11(b)(1) does not violate any of W & S's speech rights. See supra Part V(A). The question, then, reduces to whether section 3-5-11.1 may be said to work such a violation. To this end, W & S labors to characterize its concerted business activities as speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. That effort fails. 58 Business entities have no First Amendment right to combine operations or coordinate market activities for the purpose of obtaining a greater market share for each participant. The fact that communication serves as the primary instrument of conducting business among separate enterprises does not alter this conclusion. The Supreme Court elaborated on this point more than half a century ago in Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co., 336 U.S. 490, 69 S.Ct. 684, 93 L.Ed. 834 (1949). 59 The Giboney Court acknowledged that, although courses of conduct are, in most instances, effectuated by speaking or writing, it has never been deemed an abridgment of freedom of speech or press to make a course of conduct illegal merely because the conduct was in part initiated, evidenced, or carried out by means of language. Id. at 502, 69 S.Ct. 684. Indeed, [s]uch an expansive interpretation of the constitutional guaranties of speech and press would make it practically impossible ever to enforce laws against agreements in restraint of trade as well as many other agreements and conspiracies deemed injurious to society. Id.; see also Calif. Motor Transport Co. v. Trucking Unlimited, 404 U.S. 508, 513-15, 92 S.Ct. 609, 30 L.Ed.2d 642 (1972) (explaining that while communication is an integral part of joint conduct, that fact cannot be used as a pretext for obtaining immunity from laws prohibiting anticompetitive commercial activities). After all, the Court has made clear that the State does not lose its power to regulate commercial activity deemed harmful to the public whenever speech is a component of that activity. Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Ass'n, 436 U.S. 447, 456, 98 S.Ct. 1912, 56 L.Ed.2d 444 (1978) (citing the exchange of price and production information among competitors as an example of communications that are regulated without offending the First Amendment). 60 Against this backdrop, we turn to the case at hand. In enacting section 3-5-11.1, Rhode Island exercised its police power, including its power under the Twenty-First Amendment, 4 to regulate commercial transactions involving liquor and the organizational structure of the market in which such transactions take place. Seen in this light, the statute is tantamount to an antitrust law — a category of regulation that recognizes the authority of the State to adjust the distribution of market power among commercial entities so as to prevent conditions that are, in its reasonably held view, harmful to healthy competition and free trade. 61 It is black letter law that the constitutionality of the antitrust laws is not open to debate. Calif. Motor Transp., 404 U.S. at 515, 92 S.Ct. 609. Such laws, by definition, regulate the ways in which market players may pool their capabilities to acquire market power. While the State cannot regulate the right of speakers to band together to convey a common message in the marketplace of ideas, it most assuredly can exercise control over the efforts of market players to exploit the principle of strength in numbers in the marketplace of goods. See U.S. Jaycees, 468 U.S. at 638, 104 S.Ct. 3244 (O'Connor, J., concurring) (positing that there is only minimal constitutional protection of the freedom of commercial association, id. at 634, 104 S.Ct. 3244, and that, in all events, no First Amendment interest stands in the way of a State's rational regulation of economic transactions by or within a commercial association); Kathleen M. Sullivan, Free Speech and Unfree Markets, 42 U.C.L.A. L.Rev. 949, 950 (1995) (observing that, in the modern constitutional order, legislatures are free to pass laws that override private economic arrangements on allocative grounds — such as correcting for collective action problems, externalities, information asymmetries, or monopolies — or for reasons of redistribution or paternalism). 62 The case law dealing with claimed exceptions to antitrust or commercial conspiracy laws on First Amendment associational grounds indicates that the State's right to enforce such laws against collusive market behavior must abate only in instances in which the joint activity constitutes an exercise of a core speech right. In Eastern Railroad Presidents Conference v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc., 365 U.S. 127, 81 S.Ct. 523, 5 L.Ed.2d 464 (1961), the Supreme Court recognized that commercial actors' concerted petitioning for legislative change was a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment and, therefore, exempt from certain applications of the antitrust laws. Id. at 136-38, 81 S.Ct. 523. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. 886, 102 S.Ct. 3409, 73 L.Ed.2d 1215 (1982), where black citizens had banded together to boycott white merchants as a means of protesting discriminatory practices, the Supreme Court held that the merchants could not premise liability for state antitrust violations and common law conspiracy on the boycotters' collective exercise of First Amendment rights. See id. at 890-92, 915, 933, 102 S.Ct. 3409. Finding that the boycott involved the exercise of core First Amendment rights (speech, petition, and assembly), the Court ruled that the State's right to regulate economic activity could not justify a complete prohibition against a nonviolent, politically motivated boycott designed to force governmental and economic change and to effectuate rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Id. at 914, 102 S.Ct. 3409. Several other cases in that lineage also turned on the fact that the concerted activity implicated exceptions to the antitrust laws designed to protect core speech rights. See, e.g., Prof'l Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Indus., Inc., 508 U.S. 49, 56-60, 113 S.Ct. 1920, 123 L.Ed.2d 611 (1993) (explaining that antitrust liability cannot be imposed upon entities that collectively pursue objectively reasonable litigation, even when an anticompetitive intent motivates the suit); United Mine Workers of Am. v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657, 669-70, 85 S.Ct. 1585, 14 L.Ed.2d 626 (1965) (decreeing that antitrust laws cannot be interpreted to prohibit joint efforts to influence public officials through otherwise legal methods). 63 These cases must be contrasted with cases such as FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Ass'n, 493 U.S. 411, 110 S.Ct. 768, 107 L.Ed.2d 851 (1990), in which the Court upheld the imposition of an injunction under the Sherman Act against a cadre of court-appointed lawyers that enjoined their concerted refusal to accept further case assignments pending a requested fee increase. See id. at 426-36, 110 S.Ct. 768. The Court explained that the undenied objective of [the] boycott was an economic advantage for those who agreed to participate, id. at 426, 110 S.Ct. 768, and that the lawyers' joint activity was aimed at profit[ing] financially from a lessening of competition in the boycotted market, id. at 427, 110 S.Ct. 768 (internal quotation marks omitted). In those circumstances, the Court refused to accept the lawyers' claim that the law, as applied, violated their right to associate for expressive purposes because to do so would be to exaggerate[] the significance of the expressive component in the [lawyers'] boycott. Id. at 430, 110 S.Ct. 768. In the absence of anything uniquely expressive about the concerted commercial activity, no First Amendment exception to the enforcement of an otherwise valid antitrust law was warranted. Id. at 431, 110 S.Ct. 768 (noting that [t]he most blatant, naked price-fixing agreement is a product of communication, but that is surely not a reason for viewing it with special solicitude); accord Nat'l Soc'y of Prof'l Eng'rs v. United States, 435 U.S. 679, 697, 98 S.Ct. 1355, 55 L.Ed.2d 637 (1978) (upholding, against a First Amendment challenge, an antitrust injunction that prohibited a professional society from adopting any official opinion, policy statement, or guideline stating or implying that competitive bidding is unethical). 64 Here, it is nose-on-the-face plain that W & S's commercial conduct exhibits nothing that even the most vivid imagination might deem uniquely expressive. Certainly, the mere fact that the joint activities that define the business relationship between the franchisor and its franchisees have some communicative component cannot, in and of itself, establish an entitlement to the prophylaxis of the First Amendment. See Superior Court Trial Lawyers, 493 U.S. at 430, 110 S.Ct. 768. Consequently, that conduct does not warrant overriding the State's historic right to regulate market forces in the retail liquor industry. 5 65 In sum, W & S has not established that the neoteric laws prohibiting the holders of Class A liquor licenses from conducting joint business activities infringe upon any right to advance its beliefs or ideas by engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment. Accordingly, there is scant reason to believe that W & S can succeed on the merits of its freedom of expressive association claim.