By Monica Youn, the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU School of Law, and the editor of Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United.
That the conservative majority of the Roberts Court are champions of free speech is a trope that simply refuses to die. The New York Times summed up the Court’s most recent term by describing free speech as a “signature project” of Chief Justice Roberts, and numerous commentators have chimed in, contributing to the common misperception that the Roberts Court is “the most free speech Court in American history.” Efforts to debunk this myth, by Erwin Chemerinsky, David Cole, and Nadine Strossen, among others, have seemingly failed to make much of a dent in the popular wisdom.
Ben Sachs’ forthcoming Columbia Law Review article, “Unions, Corporations, and Political Opt-Out Rights after Citizens United,” serves as a useful corrective, and, indeed, is one of the absolutely essential pieces of scholarship that I’ve seen in the wake of the decision. But before getting into the article in more depth, let’s look at some basic numbers for background.
In its first five years, from 2006 until 2011, the Roberts Court granted certiorari in 29* cases in which a free speech violation was claimed (including the speech, press, assembly, and association guarantees). In these cases, the Court held that that a free speech violation existed in 10 of the cases, and that no free speech violation had been demonstrated in 19 of these cases. Thus, simply looking at the numbers, the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim in 34.48 percent of argued cases. By way of comparison, as Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal have shown, from 1953 to 2004, the Supreme Court supported claims of deprivation of First Amendment liberties in 53.95 percent of argued cases. Thus, at the most basic quantitative level, the Roberts Court seems to be not especially protective of free speech rights.