The Beauty of Citizens United

Professor Joel Gora recently posted on SSRN his latest article Free Speech, Fair Elections, and Campaign Finance Laws: Can They Co-Exist?. The full text of the article appears at 56 Howard Law Journal 763 and is available here. The abstract reads:

A prominent politician once observed that, "You can either have free speech or fair elections, but you can’t have both." In the view of this article, that has it precisely backwards. In fact, you cannot have one without the other. The election of 2012 tested that thesis because it was the most expensive federal election in history and it contained what many claimed was a great deal of negative campaign speech and rhetoric. This paper argues that, under the First Amendment, election speech is supposed to be "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" and unrestrained in both quantity and content. Accordingly, the increase in campaign spending and activity by candidates, parties, non-profits organizations, labor unions, corporations and so-called "super pacs" is a good thing for free speech principles and democracy, not a bad thing, and efforts to impose greater limitations on campaign funding should be opposed. The same is also true for the supposed increase in the "negative" nature of the content of much campaign speech. There too a proper view of the First Amendment would applaud and encourage such robust debate about core issues of governance. The article concludes by advocating a number of reforms which will make our electoral speech even more vigorous than it is now.