Sean Griffith on Compelled Corporate Speech

Do shareholder proposals compel corporations to speak in ways that violate the First Amendment? Although shareholder proposals have been studied from numerous angles, the concept of compelled speech is fairly novel. And this question raises several other inquiries, including the nature of corporate purpose and the rationale behind negative speech rights in the first place. Joining us to discuss this fascinating proposition is Professor Sean J. Griffith, the T.J. Maloney Chair in Business Law at Fordham Law School, a former Director of the Fordham Corporate Law Center, and an expert in corporate and securities law. Tuning in, you’ll gain insight into Sean’s paper, ‘Shareholder Proposals and the Negative Speech Rights of Corporations’, how the shareholder proposal rule predominantly relates to sociopolitical issues rather than financial or company performance issues, and how it compels corporations to speak on controversial issues. We also touch on a corporation’s right to religious freedom, what companies can do to oppose shareholder proposals and much more, so be sure to listen in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• What inspired Sean to write articles on shareholder proposals and corporate speech.
• Corporations that the shareholder proposal rule applies to and what it entails.
• How the shareholder rule (Rule 14a-8) has evolved since its inception.
• Ways that shareholder proposals compel corporations to speak on controversial issues.
• Supreme court cases that illustrate violations of companies’ First Amendment rights.
• Insight into how a company might seek exclusion from the SEC.
• The relationship between corporate negative speech rights and corporate purpose.
• Intrinsic interests, corporate souls, and the rationale behind negative speech rights.
• Whether or not every social “hot button” issue affects a company’s financial performance.
• How companies can seek to exclude shareholder proposals.
• Why existing policy arguments for and against shareholder proposals haven’t necessarily included First Amendment rights.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Sean J. Griffith

Sean J. Griffith on LinkedIn

‘Shareholder Proposals and the Negative Speech Rights of Corporations’

'What’s “Controversial” About ESG? A Theory of Compelled Commercial Speech under the First Amendment’

Fordham University School of Law Corporate Law Center

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The desire that the corporation wants is to is the thing that the corporation wants is to keep quiet, to not speak. So that's a what you would call that a negative speech right. But that raises the issue is, well, do we have those rights? And the answer is, of course, people have those rights. The famous cases are involve the Pledge of Allegiance, right? So there are students that didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance. They also involve the famous case in New Hampshire where the person doesn't want to put the license plate on their car that says live free or die. So those people have negative speech rights. There's no question that the First Amendment protects negative speech rights. The question is, the interesting question is, is does it protect corporate negative speech rights?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

You're listening to Bite-sized business law, where we discuss big issues in small doses. This podcast is sponsored by the Fordham University School of Law Corporate Law Center, which is run by Fordham Law Professor Richard Squire and me, your host Amy Martella. Okay, let's get down to business. Welcome back to Bite-sized business law. Today we're discussing shareholder proposals. This is a topic that's been studied in every which way, except really for one, and that is whether shareholder proposals compel a corporation to speak in a way that violates the First Amendment. And this question, in turn, raises all sorts of other questions, such as corporate purpose and the rationale behind negative speech rights in the first place. Of course, only one person could have come up with such an interesting proposition, and that is our guest today, Sean Griffith. Sean Griffith is the TJ Mahoney Chair in Business Law here at Fordham Law School, where he teaches corporations and related courses. He's an expert on corporate and securities law with a wide breadth of scholarly work in those areas. And he's also a past director of the Fordham Corporate Law Center. We're so happy to have him back here today. Sean, welcome. Thanks, Amy. Hi. So last time we spoke, you had written an article called What's Controversial About ESG? And it seems like in some ways this paper almost builds off of it. So what inspired you to write this article?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Well, that prior article, of course, is about whether the SEC can compel corporations to make controversial disclosures about ESG-related topics, like, for example, climate change or diversity or other kinds of ESG topics. But in connection with that paper, it occurred to me as an offshoot that that happens all the time. The SEC, through its shareholder proposal rule, regularly forces corporations to engage in speech on controversial topics. And I had a footnote in there on the topic of the shareholder proposal rule, but it turns out that that shareholder proposal rule opens a whole avenue of exploration for how the First Amendment relates to corporations.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

So a footnote has turned into this long and interesting paper.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Emphasis on long.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

I love talking about the First Amendment, especially in this context. And one thing that we'll get to, you point out that it's really not been discussed in this context. So just a few kind of foundational things for our listeners. First of all, are we talking about public corporations only?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Well, certainly wouldn't be the case that only public corporations have First Amendment rights, but the shareholder proposal rule does apply only to public corporations.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

And can you tell us exactly what are shareholder proposals?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Well, there's a long history. The shareholder proposal rule sort of comes out in the late 1930s, early 1940s when the SEC starts regulating the proxy process or the shareholder voting process. In the original rule, the idea was that shareholders have to be informed about anything that's going to be discussed at the annual meeting as shareholders no longer sort of show up at the annual meeting. They need to get information about things that are going to be discussed at the annual meeting. And the question was, well, how should we inform them about items that are going to come up from the floor? And so the shareholder proposal rule evolved as a mechanical way of informing shareholders and getting their consent to certain kinds of actions from the floor at the annual meeting. Around the 1970s, the shareholder proposal rule, though, turned into something else, and that something else is the thing that it is today.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Okay, so it sounds like in the beginning when this rule was first adopted. And am I right that it's rule 14A8 of the 34 hours?

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, it is now rule 14A8. In its earlier history, it had different numbers and so on. But yes, that the current version is Rule 14A8.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Okay, so at one time these proposals were limited to proposals related to the financial performance of the firm. But as you describe in the paper, they started to evolve in the 60s and 70s. You had a great example about the Vietnam War and Dow Chemical. That made a lot of sense to me. So how do you think about the evolution of how they've become kind of hot button topics?

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Sure. Well, it's consistent with the story that we tell about the history of the 1960s and the 1970s generally. In that era, you had people who were very passionate and engaged in certain kinds of social and political issues, many of which we might share. And some of those issues were related to the production of munitions for the Vietnam War. So that would be, I think, the Dow chemical case. And the idea was that activists would use whatever mechanism they could to engage that particular issue. And one of those mechanisms was that they discovered at that time was the shareholder proposal rule. If you could cause corporations to make disclosures and make statements about their production of munitions for the Vietnam War and so on, you could raise bad negative publicity to the corporation and hopefully, if you were successful, cause the company to abandon that line of business and maybe make the production of munitions less possible. I think that was the larger idea of those activists in the 1960s and 1970s. But now today, a majority of shareholder proposals are that sort of category of thing. They're focused on a social or political issue more than they are focused on a financial issue or a matter that's raised related to the performance of the company's business.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Yeah, so you have this statistic which is really interesting. And that was that in this past year, in 2023, there were something like 900 shareholder proposals put forward, and 65% of them were about these social issues. The large majority of them were about the social issues that you describe. But of all of those, only 25 actually passed. So, like, why do we keep doing this? Why are we continuing to put forth shareholder proposals? And also, follow-up question: does that actually represent an increase in the amount of shareholder proposals that we typically have seen through the course of time and those getting passed?

SPEAKER_00 6:23

I'm not sure that passage is the right way to think about the objective. Even from the 60s and 70s, the the early social entrepreneurs were focused not so much on getting a particular resolution passed as they were in raising the issue at the corporate level and then to all the shareholders and then by extension to the national press. And I think that something similar is the strategy today. Another way in which the passage statistic is deceptive is one of the ways that corporations can get out of being forced to include the shareholder proposal is by causing the shareholder to dismiss it or to leave it alone, or by showing the SEC that they've already substantially performed some aspect of the shareholder proposal. So a lot of the statistics are the dogs that don't bark. There are probably negotiated settlements in many cases between the proponents of these kinds of proposals and the companies themselves, where the company adopts to some degree the social change idea that is foisted upon them through the shareholder proposal process.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Got it. Okay. So it's like how a lot of cases settle. It's not that there's no action being taken, it's just that they're they're not going fully to trial and burden. That sounds right. Okay. So Rule 14A8 requires companies to include these in these proposals in their proxy material. And since most of these shareholder proposals raise these controversial social issues, you see it as the government compelling the company to speak on controversial issues. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Ultimately that's what it is. The company can't decide not to do it because the government forces them to do it. And the rules are specifically designed to elicit this sort of controversial speech. The way that 14A8 works is there are a number of exceptions to the rule that says you have to include the shareholder proposal. So there are numerous exceptions that the company can cite for not having to include the proposal. And then if it leads to a dispute, the company can show it to the SEC, and the SEC, if they agree with the company, will issue what's called a no action letter, which basically means the SEC won't take action if the proposal is excluded. But there are exceptions to the exceptions. So for one of the exceptions is the ordinary business exception. So if the proposal relates raises a matter related to the company's ordinary business, then the company can exclude the shareholder proposal. What's an ordinary business? What products you sell? So there's a famous case involving Walmart where one of the shareholders wants them to not sell guns that the assault rifle type guns, semi-automatic rifles. And Walmart seeks to exclude it on the basis of ordinary business because what the retailer puts on its shelves, the question should be you know that's that's essentially an ordinary business decision. But the exception to the exception is if an ordinary business question transcends, if there's an aspect of the ordinary business determination that transcends ordinary business matters, if that raises a social and ethical issue that transcends ordinary business, then it must be included. And that's the way in which the rule selects for controversial materials. And it's not up to the company to choose to not include it, right? They would be facing enforcement action by the SEC if they did that.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

But how do you think about who's doing the speaking? Because you're saying the company's being forced to speak, but these are proposals on behalf of like random groups of shareholders that when you see it in the proxy material, we all understand, okay, this isn't the director of Walmart who feels this way. This is like a shareholder, random shareholder who wants this proposal included.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah. There are numerous ways to think about that. One is that shareholders have lots of avenues to speak, and that to marshal the company's resources to perpetuate their speech is not something that you would ordinarily think of as one of the rights inherent in being a shareholder of the company. But the case that's most similar to this is a Supreme Court case called Pacific Gas and Electric, where the utility, a California utility, was sending out bills. In its bills, the mailers that it sent out with the bills would have some room for extra pages. And the the utility started to publish a newsletter that included like some information about whatever went in this newsletter. A citizens group was unhappy about this, and they wanted to include some of their information in the public utilities newsletter. And so they petitioned the California utility regulator. California allowed them to do this. And so it was clear that it was the it was the citizens themselves or the tax or the ratepayers themselves who were putting their information in the company's bill. There was no question about confusion, but the fact was that they were being forced to carry the message of someone else. And the Supreme Court said, and Pacific Gas and Electric that that violated the company's First Amendment rights. Okay, right. And so there's a very similar situation here for corporations in who are carrying shareholder proposals, right? There's no question about confusion. It says very clearly that this is the proposal of so-and-so. The company recommends that the shareholders vote against it, and then they conclude that they include their own proposal. There are also, there are other Supreme Court cases in this very in this similar area where a politician will be given a right of reply to an editorial against him or her by a TV station or in a newspaper. And that right of reply, because it forces the makes the company devote space to it, or the press company devotees space to it, discourages the company from doing the editorial, get engaging in the political speech in the first place. And the Supreme Court says, look, that being forced to answer is something we don't want to do either. And so there's a similar principle operating here as well. So once the shareholder issues their proposal, the company is in a position of having to answer what the shareholder proposal is. So there's sort of a double problem there.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Aaron Powell But do you agree that this is a content neutral? No, because they're not being told what to publish, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:58

They are. They are being told what to publish. So the rule screens for the content of the message, right? So the rule, the rule that I was just describing, for example, the ordinary business exception. So it's not an ordinary business exception if the issue transcends social, if there's a social or political issue that transcends ordinary business. That is a content-based rule. That rule doesn't say it is not neutralized to content. That rule says if if there's a significant, transcendently important social or ethical issue, then that must be included. You must include that. So that is content-based, not content neutral.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

So how would a company go about getting this excluded? You alluded to it before, that they seek an exclusion, they go to the SEC, and then the SEC decides. Now, it sounds like what you wrote in your paper is that these decisions are almost never appealed for whatever reason it might be. So that therefore the government does get the final say.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Kroger wrote for no action relief. The SEC accorded no action relief. The shareholders then went to appeal the matter straight. I think they went straight to the Fifth Circuit. I'm not sure procedurally, but there is a means of appealing, but it's rare. There has to be interest group backing. It's not the kind of thing often the company's interest is just to capitulate.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yeah, right. Okay. So it's interesting because your paper raises other questions. And one of which we have talked a lot about at Bite Size Business Law, and that's corporate purpose, right? So when you have, and you make a really succinct case up for this, I think, because we've talked a lot about analyzing the civil rights of corporations, including, of course, the First Amendment rights of corporations, where that line is. And I thought you made a really nice succinct case in your paper that when you have a closely held corporation, shareholders might have values that are capable of being expressed through the corporation, right? Certainly when you have a social proprietorship or something like that, or even a bigger company, but it's still closely held. But as the corporation grows, publicly traded companies, their shared values literally they diffuse to the point where you can truly say that there's only one thing they have in common, and that is shareholder wealth maximization. It's a big part of this paper. You really have to buy into that before you get to all the rest. So with the recognition of like we all have this one narrow purpose, this one thing that we can say we have in common at a large company, comes the recognition that we also get a narrow First Amendment protection for that. Right. So any speech that's not on the subject of regulating wealth maximization, that can be regulated. Am I getting this right? But so it basically is all boiling down to whether these companies have negative speech rights.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

So here's the way I would put it. Okay. I think that this shareholder proposal rule is an annoying rule. Nobody likes it. If you ask any corporate lawyer or any SEC lawyer, they'll say, look, this rule is a pimple. No one cares about it. You know, it's a it's an annoyance. Why would anyone get really vexed about this? Aren't there mergers and acquisitions for us to do, right? So, and I understand that argument, right? There are billions of dollars that change hands in MA, and this is an annoyance at best from a corporate perspective. Why I think the shareholder proposal rule is interesting is that it forces us to confront the nature of corporate speech rights. And so your question, your question poses that issue. Well, in order for everything that we have just described to be problematic, the corporation has to have a First Amendment right not to be imposed upon by the government in the way that we have been describing. So do they have that right? If they have that right, we would characterize it as a negative right. In other words, the right to keep one's peace. The corporation isn't saying anything. The corporation just wants to not be imposed upon by the state, to be forced to say something. So that's a negative right. The desire that the corporation wants is to, is the thing that the corporation wants is to keep quiet, to not speak. So that's a what you would call that a negative speech right. But that raises the issue is, well, do we have those rights? And the answer is, of course, people have those rights. The famous cases are involve the Pledge of Allegiance, right? So there are students that didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance. They also involve the famous case in New Hampshire where the person doesn't want to put the license plate on their car that says live free or die. So those people have negative speech rights. There's no question that the First Amendment protects negative speech rights. The question is, the interesting question is, is does it protect corporate negative speech rights? Now that raises the whole larger issue of corporate speech rights. Corporations have First Amendment speech rights. There's no question about that. The case is, there's a case called Bilotti from the 1970s, a bank in Boston, that wanted to engage in speech relating to a ballot referendum in the city of Boston, I think. And the city said, you know, you can't do that. And the case went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, this is a corporation, it has speech rights. But what were the speech rights there? They were affirmative speech rights. They were the right to engage in speech, not the right not to be imposed upon or the right to not have to speak. So we know that corporations have affirmative speech rights, but when do they have affirmative speech rights? In other words, what's the rationale for the affirmative speech rights? And the Supreme Court gave what you would call an instrumental rationale. It is that when corporations engage in speech, it enriches political debate. And what we really care about is democratic self-determination. And what the First Amendment supports is democratic self-determination. And so we allow corporations to engage in speech in order to support that policy objective. So to take a step back, why do corporations have speech rights? The Supreme Court says to protect democratic deliberation. The trouble is that that rationale does not support negative speech rights, because negative speech rights have nothing to do with democratic deliberation, right? That's somebody being quiet doesn't improve the quality of democratic debate. The reason that human beings, like those people in New Hampshire, and I think it was West Virginia, where they didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, why do those people have negative speech rights? It's not for instrumental reasons. In those cases, it's clearly an intrinsic right of the human being to express oneself and to be free from imposition. So in those cases, the Supreme Court says things like freedom of conscience, freedom of the intellect and spirit, the idea that there is an inner core of the human being that should be free from government imposition. The government shouldn't be able to impose ideas upon that core of the human being. The trouble is, of course, that human beings, uh corporations are not human beings. They're not natural people, they don't have natural rights in the same way. They've been accorded this affirmative speech right for an instrumental reason in the Biladi case, also in the Citizens United case, same rationale. But they don't have, they don't participate in humanness, and so they don't participate in human rights. And so the natural rights that would accord negative speech rights to human beings wouldn't seem to extend to corporations. And so, from my perspective, this is an interesting project because it forces us to confront that fact and ask the question of under what circumstances do corporations have negative speech rights, or do they at all? Perhaps they don't.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah, I mean, when I was reading this, I'm thinking if the intrinsic rationale is the only thing supporting negative speech rights, then I would argue corporations don't have negative speech rights, right? Because you use this phrase, you know, rooted in the integrity of conscience. And that's right. That's like the inherent human dignity that gives us that right not to speak. It's the same thing that makes me scratch my head about whether corporations should have the right to exercise religion. It's one of these like aspects that you feel you accord only to natural persons.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Well, I'm glad you raised the religion point because that's that's exactly the way I think that's the key to understanding the issue. So in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court said that corporations do have free exercise rights under the First Amendment. But what's interesting about the Hobby Lobby case is that it was a particular kind of corporation. It was a small, there were several of these corporations. They were closely held corporations. What does that mean? They're owned by a small number of individuals, in this case a family, that all presumably had similar values with regard to the particular issue in that case. And the Supreme Court said very clearly that corporations don't have any rights other than the rights of their shareholders, and shareholders don't lose the rights that they have as people when they associate in corporate form. And so the corporation can act on the basis of this sort of free exercise right because the individuals that form the corporations have that right. Now, that it's very clear in the Hobby Lobby case that that rationale applies to closely held corporations because only in a closely held corporation can you presume or find that the shareholders have that kind of a unified interest in that particular type of an issue, a sort of a broad-based issue. For a publicly held corporation, and as we've already discussed, only publicly held corporations have a problem with the shareholder proposal rule. It only applies to them. If the basis of extending intrinsic rights to corporations is the common interest of their shareholders, the interest that they hold in common as human beings, and the reason for extending it to closely held corporations is that, well, there are so few shareholders that they can have a common interest that it's it's possible to talk about them in that way. Is there any way that we can talk about publicly held corporations in the same way? And the answer, as you have alluded to, is of course there is, but there is only one thing. It is if you can think of it as the greatest common denominator or the least common. Denominator. It's the only thing that shareholders have in common in a publicly held corporation, which is the desire for a return on their investment. You and I might have all kinds of different objectives. Sometimes we might agree, sometimes we might conflict, but when we act as investors in a corporation, what we want is a return on our investment to protect our retirement, to allow our children to go to college, whatever the reason is. And so that is the one unifying interest that we can presume on the part of all shareholders in a publicly held corporation. That's their soul, right? So if they have that common interest, that's the common interest. That's the intrinsic interest of the corporation. And that becomes the rationale from which we can extend a corporate negative speech right. It wouldn't extend to other things, but it would starting from that small rationale, that can be the basis of their intrinsic speech rights. Now, intrinsic speech rights in the negative sense, but also the positive sense, because I think this argument implies that there is a protection for corporate negative speech rights in the way that we've just described. But it also implies that the protection that corporations get for their positive speech rights is much more narrow than people might normally think. It extends only from the intrinsic value of wealth maximization. So when corporations go off and hold forth on things that have nothing to do with wealth maximization, it's not clear that that interest is protected by their intrinsic right, by their intrinsic interest as shareholders, which is only based on wealth maximization. Furthermore, those cases that give corporations speech rights are all based on an instrumental rationale. And the instrumental rationale that comes up expressly in political situations. So in the Meladi case, there was a ballot initiative. In the Citizens United case, it was a case about speech directly relating to an electoral matter. So when the when the speech is not narrowly political, it's not clear that the instrumental rationale protects corporate affirmative speech rights either. In other words, at the end of my story, if I if my account of corporate speech rights is correct, there is a strong basis for negative speech rights, at least when they're being imposed upon by the government in ways that do not focus on their shareholder wealth maximization. But there is also a rather a much weaker foundation for their affirmative speech rights, weaker than many people suppose, because the intrinsic basis of those speech rights would only be based upon, again, shareholder wealth maximization. And when the speech goes beyond that, there's not it's not clear that it's protected.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

But Sean, isn't it the case that every societal hot button issue has an effect on the financial performance of the company? To the extent where you can say, well, now you can regulate everything because it all falls within this shareholder wealth maximization paradigm.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

I don't think so. I think at a minimum we would say that the burden of proof should be somewhere else to show that these issues are ultimately financial. And ultimately, I think when we ask ourselves the question of are should corporations manage themselves to some kind of a social issue, if we really believe that those issues were financial and they had a direct financial impact, the question we might ask ourselves is why wouldn't they be doing it already? Right? Managers have very strong incentives to maximize profit, to maximize return on investment. Their strong incentive is based upon having more wealth and power under their control. It's based upon their incentive and their incentive compensation arrangements. So if all of these things ultimately redounded into economic success, we would expect managers to already be doing these sorts of things. The fact that managers are resisting or don't push on these issues or don't manage towards social issues in the way that we might speculate that they should suggest that they're not really about shareholder return.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

So what do you suggest companies do? I mean, you're saying that shareholder proposals and societal issues are forcing them to speak on something outside of the goal of wealth and maximization and therefore are compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment. So practically, do you think the next time that they seek to exclude a shareholder proposal that there's a company that should make this argument? Because it sounds like these annoying shareholder proposals, lawyers would be thrilled and clients would be thrilled to get rid of most of them if they could.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

It would be wonderful if a corporation sought to resist a shareholder proposal under either the relevance exception or the which also comes to these social and ethical issues, or the ordinary business exception on a First Amendment basis. That would set up a very interesting case. This case in the Fifth Circuit that I mentioned to you tees up that issue, but it teas it up, it was an intervener in that case that teas up that issue. It wasn't directly the parties. Parties are making a related but slightly different argument. It would be wonderful if a corporation would challenge Rule 14A8 from a First Amendment perspective. And I suspect that many corporations would thank that company after they were successful.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

That would end up being a that would be a big Supreme Court case, I bet, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:08

It might be a big Supreme Court case. It might be the kind of case though that can get disposed of on the circuit level, but it could wind up being, as you say, a big Supreme Court case.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Aaron Powell Now, why do you think, just in closing, you say that commentators have talked about all manner of policy reasons for and against shareholder proposals, but never really in the context of the First Amendment. And of course, these policy arguments are pretty worthless if we find fundamental constitutional problems with shareholder proposals.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

So why haven't they studied this? And it's interesting, the doctrines evolved at the same time, right? So the there are a number of doctrinal steps that you have to get to to the to where you question that you need to have the compelled, you have compelled speech, but then you also have the commercial speech doctrine. Probably what the SEC regulates is commercial speech, and the question of whether you can compel commercial speech. There was a doctrinal evolution that really didn't finish until the 1980s with regard to that particular doctrine. And that's the doctrine that allows us to step back and say, ah, there might be some, there might be some constitutional defects here. Those are sort of late-evolving. The First Amendment rights of corporations are also somewhat late-evolving. The Bilati case that I mentioned, I think, is a 1970s case. The Citizens United case, which is a case that reaffirms Bilati, is a much more recent case. And there are more rec there are cases that are just being decided even now that have implications on corporate speech rights. So I think that that it might just be the case that the doctrinal pieces were not in play to ask the question in a sophisticated way.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Well, we're so grateful that you're here pulling back the curtain on all of this, because this raises a lot of interesting, thought-provoking questions. And thank you so much for your time today and for uncovering all of these interesting matters. Thank you, Amy, and thanks for this opportunity to speak to your audience. All right, thanks, Sean. Thanks to everyone at Fordham Law School, especially the Dean's Office and our corporate law center donors for supporting this podcast. Bite-sized Business Law is produced by We Edit Podcasts. Listen and subscribe to Bite-Sized Business Law on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The information in this podcast is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, nor is it intended to promote the organizations with which our guests are affiliated. For more information, check out our show notes, and thanks for listening.