On January 25, 2010, the United States Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that regulations preventing corporations and unions from spending general treasury funds in elections are unconstitutional under the First Amendment. This landmark decision overturned a two-decades-old precedent that had found such regulations to be reasonable restrictions when applied to for-profit corporations, because of the danger that corporate political expenditures would undermine the integrity of the political process. The Citizens United majority justified its conclusion by maintaining that the corporate identity of the speaker never justifies suppression of political speech.

While political speech receives the greatest protection because of its role in our democratic form of self-government, commercial speech has traditionally received less protection, because consumers rely on such speech to inform their purchases. As a result, political-speech regulations are given strict scrutiny, whereas commercial speech regulations are met with the less stringent standard of intermediate scrutiny. This Article argues that political speech of for-profit corporations should be treated more like commercial speech than pure political speech because due to the legally imposed obligation of for-profit corporations to maximize profits, there is a legally imposed profit motive when for-profit corporations engage in political speech that does not necessarily correlate with popular support for the ideas espoused by such speech. For these reasons, this Article argues that regulations of political speech by for-profit corporations should be treated with less exacting scrutiny when the democratically elected branches of government have determined that limiting such speech serves an important government interest.

School violence is a pervasive reality in these times. While it achieves its nadir in such widely publicized school shootings as at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and too many others, often it flies below the national radar. One common observation that runs through any meaningful analysis of this problem is that of the role of bullying. Bullying represents the most ubiquitous form of school violence. It is also the most fluid, as the line between victim and perpetrator shifts from one student to the other as former victims act out and become the latest perpetrator. In this powerful Article, the Author extensively documents the dynamic that develops between the bully and bullied and how, all too often, it ultimately manifests in more, and more horrific, violence. While state legislative efforts have sought to empower schools to prevent bullying, they are either in their infancy or incomplete. Instead, the Author argues, it is imperative that in dealing with the aftermath of these events courts permit the presentation of “battered child syndrome” as a possible justification defense for the acts of those formerly bullied children who now find themselves defendants to a criminal prosecution. The Author examines both the scientific research relating to this syndrome as well as its largely unsuccessful use in courts to date. The Author then draws apt comparisons to the more successful, yet largely similar, defense of “battered woman syndrome” and offers some novel suggestions to deal with the issues of imminence and reasonableness in justification defenses in the context of bullied child defendants.