First Amendment Rights in Business: Guide to Commercial Free Speech in America - Essential for Entrepreneurs, Marketers & Legal Professionals

Corporate advertising has been linked to the economic meltdown, childhood obesity, political corruption, and global climate change. In Tamara Piety's groundbreaking, thought-provoking new book, Brandishing the First Amendment, Piety argues that our modern First Amendment framework, which often protects corporate advertising from public health and safety regulation, cannot be justified. After surveying empirical research in economics, psychology, and cognitive studies, Piety unearths the real threat to individual liberties under the First Amendment: that powerful corporate interests, by brandishing the First Amendment, successfully shield their billion dollar industry from public scrutiny. This timely book is a must read for anyone seeking to understand how law, advertising, and psychology converge to insulate decisions made in the corporate boardroom from democratic review.Piety traces our current state of affairs to 1976, when, in a case known as Virginia Pharmacy, the Supreme Court changed life as we know it. Its decision to single out corporate advertising as a new category of First Amendment-protected speech ushered in an era in which the leaders of corporations--who stand to benefit financially from this arrangement--claim that the corporation is a "person" whose advertising "speech" must be unbridled in the marketplace--no matter how much this speech imperils public health, safety, and welfare; the reliability of commercial and consumer information; the stability of financial markets; and the global environment.Piety's work systematically explores the dangerous disconnect between the purposes of the First Amendment and the modern state of corporate money flows, and calls upon us to seriously reexamine our First Amendment values. When the Supreme Court designated advertising as commercial speech in 1976, its intent was to help consumers receive accurate and reliable information so that they can make rational decisions about products. Piety shows how this 1976 vision of advertising as information-dissemination is empirically at odds with the reality of market psychology as applied by corporate marketing and advertising executives today.