Law Commons^™

Who's Talking? Disentangling Government And Private Speech, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Several different constitutional rules apply to government actions that influence the content of speech. The government has far more discretion to determine speech content when the government itself is the speaker than when it regulates private speakers. Specifically, in the former circumstance, the government can discriminate according to viewpoint, whereas in the latter circumstance it cannot. While the application of the rules may be obvious when either the government or private entities speak alone, increasingly, through various different types of interactions, government and private groups or individuals are speaking together. This circumstance complicates the crucial constitutional determination, which is: who's …