tisements for accuracy, criminally prosecute false advertisements, and even
ban truthful commercial speech under certain circumstances.

The definition of commercial speech is hardly free of fateful ambiguity.
The Court agrees that the advertisement of a product or a service for a business
purpose is commercial speech. Therefore, the advertisements of shampoo
and of legal services fall within the term. Any extension of the concept beyond
that creates enormous difficulty. Assume that a group of trial attorneys or-
ganize a campaign to defeat no-fault insurance. Their self-interest is clear. If
they are successful they will, no doubt, maintain or increase the demand for
their services. Assume that a group of farmers put together a series of pub-
lications and speeches designed to maintain government price support of
specified farm products. If they succeed, they will maximize their income.
Any small exercise of memory and imagination demonstrates to all of us that
much, if not most, of political speech is moved by economic self-interest.
Arguably, much of artistic speech too. Any effort to place economically driven
speech within the category of commercial speech threatens, however, to move
a vast array of speech and publication within the dread word, commercial
speech.

SEC-regulated speech is not, on its face, the advertisement of a product or
a service for a profitable purpose. When a shampoo corporation advertises
shampoo, that is commercial speech. Even that receives some measure of
constitutional protection. When a publicly held shampoo corporation is in-
volved in a proxy battle for control, and rival management groups appeal to
shareholders for their vote, the SEC regulates the campaign literature. It is,
at best, a dubious proposition that the proxy speech is, in effect, an ad for a
product. It is obviously a dispute about the governance of an organization
that is in the form of a stock corporation. When an investment advisor rec-
ommends a stock, again, it is scarcely clear that the advice is the same as an
ad for a product or a service of the investment advisor. It is opinion (similar
to that appearing every day in the New York Times) about the financial and
business health of a corporation. We can multiply these examples of SEC
speech.

In order to adequately analyze the constitutional status of SEC-regulated
speech, we must consider the purposes of the constitutional protection, the
meaning of commercial speech as contrasted to political speech, and the
nature of SEC-regulated speech. We must also evaluate the basis for the Court's
refusal to grant full constitutional protection to commercial speech. In this
book we attempt to accomplish those aims.

Perhaps the most famous exposition of the liberal statement on the freedom
of the individual to express his or her individuality, in word or deed, is John Stuart Mill's
essay "On Liberty." ³ The scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb went so
far as to say, "Like all successful textbooks, ["On Liberty"] no longer has to
be read to make itself felt. We imbibe its 'truth' by osmosis, so to speak, from
the culture at large." ⁴

In his opening discussion, Mill states that his object is to

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