This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 19th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. A California law prohibits many government contractors from speaking out in opposition to unionization.

After filing a brief in support of the petitioners, Cato Senior Fellow in

constitutional studies, Ilia Shapiro asks,

can the California legislature really Trump the First Amendment the case chamber of commerce v Brown will be heard by the Supreme Court today

the NLARA the National Labor Relations Act was passed by Congress as this country was becoming an industrial

nation.

As companies were growing larger, there had to be a more standard nationalized way of regulating

industrial relations, negotiations between large employers and unions and so forth.

One of the important things that the NLRA did was what's called

Occupy the Field of Labor Regulation, which means that if Congress has legislated in this area, if there are regulations passed, a

state can't go in and contradict that.

Conversely, and this is what the Supreme Court precedent has held.

Conversely, if Congress has explicitly left an area

unregulated, then the states can't go in and regulate that area.

So really, it's up to Congress in this in this field of labor

organization to decide what kind of regulations to put in and what to leave

unregulated. Most importantly for this case, Chamber of Commerce versus Brown, is that Congress

said very early on with the 1947 amendments to the NLRA that protecting the freedom of speech

is very important in the labor context

and therefore you cannot regulate any speech so long as there's no threat of

reprisal or force or a promise of benefit a quid pro quo given to the type of speech.

...