ABSTRACT
Public relations practitioners recognize the central importance of communication to their occupation and the logical importance of legal protection for public relations expression. This chapter documents the omission of public relations references in legal sources, identifies and analyzes the areas of law the Court is likely to view as the equivalent of public relations. It predicts the level of First Amendment protection most likely for public relations communication. The criticisms of any sort of categorical approach to First Amendment protection center around the difficulty of defining the excluded categories and the subjectivity involved in balancing interests weighted by categories into two different tiers of protection. The Court’s approaches to commercial and corporate speech have focused on the expression’s link to a specific business entity, the economic motivation of the producer of the expression, and what the Court calls the “hearty nature” of the expression at issue.
