First Amendment ferment: Compelled commercial speech cases and the conflict over mandatory commodity fees

A battle in First Amendment free speech rights is raging over the constitutionality of mandatory commodity assessments for generic product advertising (called "commodity checkoffs"). Such advertising features slogans such as "Got Milk?" "The Other White Meat" and "Beef, It's What's for Dinner." More than {dollar}750 million is collected annually in commodity checkoffs in various industries on the basis of stand-alone legislation or marketing orders. The rationale for commodity checkoffs is to maintain and expand the market for commodities.; First Amendment challengers claim that forced payment of fees to fund commercial speech with which they disagree violates their free speech rights. The courts have addressed these arguments in a line of "compelled commercial speech" cases, including the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. United Foods, in which the Court held that mandatory fees collected for generic advertising are unconstitutional unless they are part of a broader regulatory scheme. Since the United Foods case, a spate of hotly contested cases have challenged commodity checkoffs in the lower courts. The government has defended on the grounds that the generic advertising constitutes government speech, and, therefore, is exempt from First Amendment scrutiny.; Existing research on the compelled commercial speech cases has focused on the legal battle, but not on the underlying factors that have prompted challengers to seek judicial intervention. This research performed an integrated political, legal and economic analysis of compelled commercial speech in five commodity industries: beef, pork, dairy, mushroom and tree fruit. Secondly, it contributed to political theory by extending Antonio Gramsci's theoretical conceptualization of an historic bloc that exercises hegemony in capitalist societies to the socio-economic domain of agricultural commodity production. The theoretical framework also incorporated John Kenneth Galbraith's theory of countervailing power.; The research method for the dissertation employed "investigative frames" to examine the underlying political, economic and social context signified by a line of legal cases involving constitutional challenges. This approach may be used to gain insight into other legal conflicts that represent complex political interests and issues between a dominant hegemony responding to challenges from groups and individuals with unequal power.