Is Citizens United v. FEC the Dred Scott of our era? Dred Scott infamously found human beings challenging their status as slaves not to be persons for purposes of securing the legal protections of the Constitution. Citizens United turns the table and finds inanimate corporations to not only have personhood, but to be persons with a robust claim to the protections of the First Amendment.
Unlike Dred Scott, however, Citizens United is unlikely to usher in a civil war, nor even to be the final act in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decades-long debate over campaign finance. The Court has divided and redivided ever since the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo about how to balance the equality claims underlying one-person, one-vote with the liberty commands of the First Amendment. Citizens United is the first time that the opponents of government regulation of campaign finance have commanded a clear majority.
