Theresa Lee blogs at Balkinization: “Bradley Smith and Jonathan Adler both recently raised the hue and cry that secondary consumer boycotts are leading to the demise of civil society. As with boycotts, the political and the economic regularly overlap in our current political climate. And in many cases, that interaction is lauded as a vindication of the First Amendment. In that vein, there is already a highly regulated area of law dealing with the interaction of the political and the economic: campaign finance. In Citizens United, the Court rejected the idea that resources from the economic marketplace should not be deployed in the political marketplace—a position Smith evidently supports. This latest argument against the use of the political consumer boycott wants to have it both ways—it would allow the economic to affect the political when corporations or wealthy individuals do so but bemoans the loss of civil society when consumers take action. While there are differences in the way each set of resources is deployed, these are inevitable ones that stem from the different economic power possessed by corporations versus the average consumer.”

And of course anyone interested in the topic of boycotts as First Amendment speech and not harassment in the campaign finance context should read Elian Dashev’s fine piece.