This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 23rd, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

When a corporation defends itself against an attack in the press insisting that

their products are good, that the attack is mistaken.

Is that commercial speech deserving of First Amendment protection?

What about billboards and magazine ads and online videos?

At the Cato Institute's conference on the First Amendment, Martin Reddish of Northwestern Law School discussed the ways in which commercial speech has been at times diminished as speech worth protecting.

The subject of commercial speech is a very personal one for me because it's had a lot to do with my career.

The very first article I ever published was my senior thesis at law school and it was entitled

the First Amendment in the Marketplace Commercial Speech and the Values of

Free Expression. At the time, this was 1970, no one, literally no one had ever suggested that commercial advertising was deserving of First Amendment protection.

The Supreme Court in 1942 had spent three paragraphs just

shunting it aside as preposterous and I decided to write my my thesis on making the argument that as a matter of First Amendment

theory commercial advertising was deserving of significant First Amendment

protection. This was not a popular position at Harvard Law School.

People keyed my car.

They pushed me into the lockers.

And that was just the professors.

I published the piece in 1971 in the George Washington Law Review and it was received with some interest some

hostility and then everything died down until a few years later when the Supreme Court decided commercial advertising

deserve First Amendment protection and over the years that protection has grown so now the whole field is a cottage industry.

And a couple of years ago people decided, where did all this start?

And people began to trace it back to my 1971 article. They didn't mean it as

...