The Yale Law Journal Online is reissuing Elizabeth Pollman's Citizens Not United: The Lack of Stockholder Voluntariness in Corporate Political Speech in light of recent developments at the Supreme Court.

With the Supreme Court hearing a new round of oral arguments in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court appears poised to alter dramatically the landscape of corporate political speech law. The case concerns whether the government may limit a nonprofit political advocacy group from showing a film during election season when the film casts an electoral candidate in a negative light and is financed in part by corporate donations. 

The judge-umpire analogy has become “accepted as a kind of shorthand for judicial ‘best practices’” in describing the role of a Supreme Court Justice. However, the analogy suffers from three fundamental flaws. First, courts historically aimed the judge-umpire analogy at trial judges. Second, courts intended the judge-umpire analogy as an illustrative foil to be rejected because of the umpire’s passivity. Third, the analogy inaccurately describes the contemporary role of the modern Supreme Court Justice. Nevertheless, no workable substitute for the judge-umpire analogy has been advanced. This Essay proposes that the appropriate analog for a Justice of the Supreme Court is not an umpire, but the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.