Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, and Corporate Reputation

Authors

Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University Law CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2009

Abstract

There are three distinct groups who might want to engage in speech about commercial entities or to constrain those commercial entities from making particular claims of their own. Competitors may sue each other for false advertising, consumers may sue businesses, and government regulators may impose requirements on what businesses must and may not say. In this context, this Article will evaluate a facially persuasive but ultimately misguided claim about corporate speech: that because consumers regularly get to say nasty things about corporations under the lax standards governing defamation of public figures, corporations must be free to make factual claims subject only to defamation-type restrictions on intentionally false statements. The premise that this would further equality ignores the overall structure of advertising law, in which consumers cannot be equated to advertisers, competitors are already on equal footing with one another, and the government as regulator is not supposed to be on equal footing with anyone.

Publication Citation

50 B.C. L. Rev. 1457 (2009)

Scholarly Commons Citation

Tushnet, Rebecca, "Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, and Corporate Reputation" (2009). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 26.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/26