Free speech & censorship
Should Corporations Have the Same Free Speech Rights as Individuals?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Consider whether companies and other corporate bodies ought to be entitled to exactly the same freedom of expression as individual human beings, or whether the law is right to treat them differently.
The stance
No. Corporations should not enjoy free speech rights identical to those of individuals. Rights to expression exist to protect human autonomy, conscience and dignity, which corporations do not possess; and equating corporate speech with individual speech distorts democratic equality and threatens to make ordinary public-interest regulation unworkable. The better approach, reflected in European and Canadian law, is to protect corporate expression but subject it to proportionate limits.
The case for
Corporations are associations of individuals, so restricting their speech indirectly silences the people who pool resources through them.
Shareholders, employees and members express themselves collectively through the corporate form. On this view, a ban on corporate advocacy is a constraint on the combined expression of real people, and the US Supreme Court in Citizens United and Bellotti treated the value of the speech as turning on its content, not the corporate identity of the speaker.
The case against
Rights to expression derive from human dignity and conscience, which corporations lack.
An individual speaks to express belief, identity or conscience; a company speaks instrumentally, to advance profit or strategy. As Dworkin argued, rights are 'trumps' protecting individual dignity. Protecting a balance sheet is not the same moral exercise as protecting a person's voice, so the case for identical protection collapses.
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