This valuable book by Rome and Roberts, attorneys and participants in several Supreme Court cases involving commerical and corporate free speech, stands alone as a monographic treatment addressing the topic of the First Amendment and corporate and commercial free speech...It is a thorough, careful treatment of an area of growing importance. One would have to turn to the extensive law review literature on this topic for comparable, if partial, treatment...The book is detailed and sophisticated enough to be of use to legal counsels and academics, but it could be read with profit by upper-division and graduate students.
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Reviews
This valuable book by Rome and Roberts, attorneys and participants in several Supreme Court cases involving commercial and corporate free speech, stands alone as a monographic treatment addressing the topic of the First Amendment and corporate and commercial free speech. The book is divided into two parts: the first deals with corporate commercial speech and other forms of commerically oriented business expression; the second covers corporate political speech. Given the nature of case law, it is not surprising that almost three quarters of the book is devoted to commerical free speech. The work traces the evolution of the two doctrines and examines the extent to which corporate communications and commercial advertising are protectecd by the First Amendment. The material itself is often a tangled mess, but the authors do a fine job of delineating the contours of the doctrines and stating the tests currently applied by the courts in this area of the law. It is a thorough, careful treatment of an area of growing importance. One would have to turn to the extensive law review literature on this topic for comparable, if partial, treatment; much of that literature is listed in the bibiography. Table of cases. The book is detailed and sophisticated enough to be of use to legal counsels and academics, but it could be read with profit by upper-division and graduate students.—Choice