The recent decision by the Supreme Court to dash away decades of precedent and open the spigot wide for corporations to pour billions of dollars in political advertising down our throat has drawn quite a lot of knee jerk reactions from laymen not versed in the law lately.

By posting the words of one of the most far-left Justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court, I hope to inform this rampant knee-jerkism with a bit of, you know, legal analysis:

[I do not] believe that negative free speech rights, applicable to individuals and perhaps the print media, should be extended to corporations generally. [...]

Extension of the individual freedom of conscience decisions to business corporations strains the rationale of [similar] cases beyond the breaking point. To ascribe to such artificial entities an “intellect” or “mind” for freedom of conscience purposes is to confuse metaphor with reality. Corporations generally have not played the historic role of newspapers as conveyers of individual ideas and opinion. In extending positive free speech rights to corporations, this Court drew a distinction between the First Amendment rights of corporations and those of natural persons. See First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S., at 776, 98 S.Ct., at 1415; Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Service Comm’n of N.Y., 447 U.S. 530, 534-535, and n. 2, 100 S.Ct. 2326, 2331-2332, and n. 2, 65 L.Ed.2d 319 (1980). It recognized that corporate free speech rights do not arise because corporations, like individuals, have any interest in self-expression. See Bellotti, supra, 435 U.S., at 777, and n. 12, 98 S.Ct., at 1416, and n. 12; Consolidated Edison, supra, 447 U.S., at 534, n. 2, 100 S.Ct., at 2331, n. 2. It held instead that such rights are recognized as an instrumental means of furthering the First Amendment purpose of fostering a broad forum of information to facilitate self-government. See Bellotti, supra, 435 U.S., at 783, 98 S.Ct., at 1419; Consolidated Edison, supra, 447 U.S., at 533, 100 S.Ct., at 2330. [...]

PG & E is not an individual or a newspaper publisher; it is a regulated utility. The insistence on treating identically for constitutional purposes entities that are demonstrably different is as great a jurisprudential sin as treating differently those entities which are the same.