Abstract

During the Spring of 1978, the United States Supreme Court invalidated the provisions of a Massachusetts law that regulated corporate contributions or expenditures in connection with questions to be submitted to the electorate. In First National Bank v. Bellotti, a bare majority of the Court struck down the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws chapter 55, section 8 [hereinafter section 8] prohibiting corporate financial participation in elections, except where the business or assets of a corporation would be materially affected by a particular  ballot question.

Neither the Massachusetts statute nor the Belloti case deal directly with the rights of political action committees [PAC's]. Nevertheless, one cannot meaningfully discuss the role of PAC's and other artificial entities in the American elective process without assessing the potential impact of the Bellotti decision. Various commentators have already undertaken the risky business of speculating on the implications of the Bellotti case. In spite of the obvious difficulty of predicting the effects of such close decisions, in this particular case speculation is inevitable. Justice White's dissenting opinion invites such speculation when it strongly intimates that, at the very least, the Court's decision calls into question the validity of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, as well as a host of state statutes prohibiting corporate contributions to favor or oppose political candidates as opposed to ballot questions. The resulting speculation concerning future effects of the case is only valid, however, when it is based on a thorough assessment of the Bellotti decision, its logic, its methodology and its precedential underpinnings.

The thesis of this Article is that the decision in First National Bank v. Bellotti will indeed have far-reaching effects. The opinion of the Court was logically premised upon the identification of the public's right to receive information as a fundamental, underlying value of the first amendment. Since the Massachusetts statute was seen as unduly interfering with the public's right to hear a protected message, the law was deemed unconstitutional. It is the switch in focus from the right of the speaker to articulate a position to the right of the listener to receive a particular message that is the most significant development in Bellotti. Where it will lead is the stuff of which this symposium is made.

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