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. 

In The Constitutional Power To Interpret International Law, Michael Paulsen argues that “[t]he force of international law, as a body of law, upon the United States is . . . largely an illusion.” Rather than law, international law is “policy and politics.” For all the certainty with which his argument is advanced, however, it cannot survive close scrutiny. At its foundation, Paulsen’s essay rests on a pair of fundamental misconceptions of the nature of law. Law is not reduced to mere policy, to begin, simply because it can be undone. The sources of law, meanwhile, are not singular, but plural. Even were international law not domestic law, it would still be law.