Interrogating the Analogy of the Marketplace of Ideas, Interpreting the First Amendment

Zoe Sherman

Forum for Social Economics, 2019, vol. 48, issue 2, 137-146

Abstract: An oft-cited argument for the speech rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is that free trade in the metaphorical marketplace of ideas is a route toward truth. That is, competition in the market should lead to the success of the best ideas and the demise of falsehoods. But this metaphorical marketplace of ideas coexists with a literal marketplace of ideas in which communications professionals provide the speech and assemble the audiences that clients pay for. The literal marketplace is an arena in which those who pay pursue advantages in shaping communications in their own favor, not an arena structured to support the pursuit of an objective truth. The clash between the metaphorical and literal marketplaces of ideas bears importantly on first amendment jurisprudence. I apply this clashing marketplaces framework to two important first amendment cases of the past decade, Citizens United and Janus.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2019.1601123

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