# Commercial Speech The [[First Amendment]] category for speech that proposes a commercial transaction — advertising, labeling, sales pitches — and the doctrinal seam on which the [[Corporate Free Speech]] project has worked for fifty years. Commercial speech gets intermediate protection: government may regulate it for falsity or deception, may require disclosures, and gives fraud no protection at all; political speech gets the full protection that makes most regulation of it unconstitutional. So the classification of a corporate statement decides whether the state can do anything about it, and the history of the doctrine is the history of moving statements from the first box to the second. ## The doctrine For most of the twentieth century advertising was simply outside the amendment (*Valentine v. Chrestensen*, 1942). *Virginia State Board of Pharmacy* (1976) brought it in, on the consumer's right to receive price information; *Central Hudson* (1980) supplied the four-part test still used — is the speech lawful and non-misleading, is the government interest substantial, does the regulation directly advance it, is it no more extensive than necessary. The deregulatory turn came in the twenty-first century: *Sorrell v. IMS Health* (2011) struck a Vermont limit on the sale of prescriber data as content- and speaker-based discrimination, and *NIFLA v. Becerra* (2018) struck California's requirement that crisis-pregnancy centers post notices about state services as compelled speech — decisions that treat regulation of commercial information as presumptively suspect and have been used since against disclosure mandates on everything from calorie counts to conflict minerals. The dissents in both warned that the majority was converting a consumer-protection doctrine into a deregulatory weapon. ## Why the boundary matters here Mobil's advocacy advertisements ([[Advocacy Advertising]], [[Mobil Oil]]) were designed in the 1970s to sit in the political box, and *Bellotti* (1978) and [[Citizens United v. FEC]] (2010) put the corporation's political voice under full protection. The live fight is which box climate statements go in: the fossil-fuel defendants in the state and municipal climate-liability suits argue that decades of statements minimizing climate risk were political advocacy on a public question, immune from deception law, while the plaintiffs argue they were marketing — commercial speech about the product, actionable under consumer-protection statutes. The same question governs greenwashing claims, securities disclosure of climate risk, and the SEC's climate rule. The [[Corporate Free Speech]] page argues that the categories were built to be gamed; this page is the seam they are gamed across. See [[Merchants of Doubt]] for the statements at issue and [[Climate Change Denialism]] for their history. ## See Also - [[First Amendment]] · [[Corporate Free Speech]] · [[Citizens United v. FEC]] · [[Advocacy Advertising]] · [[Mobil Oil]] - [[Merchants of Doubt]] · [[Climate Change Denialism]] · [[ExxonMobil]]