As I mentioned earlier several tobacco companies, including Commonwealth Brands, Lorillard and RJ Reynolds, brought a lawsuit in the Western District of Kentucky challenging the constitutionality of many aspects of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 which brought the regulation of tobacco under the aegis of the FDA.  Plaintiffs had a veritable cornucopia of claims about the ways in which the Act violated their rights under the First Amendment (my favorite might be that the prohibition on  free samples was a First Amendment issue).

The district court issued an opinion in January of 2010, granting in part and denying in part the plaintiff companies' motion for summary judgment. Opinion. Most of the First Amendment arguments the plaintiffs raised were rejected except for two: the ban on color and graphics in advertising and the ban on implying that a tobacco product is safer because of FDA regulation. [The last issue illustrates one of the thorny problems with giving over the regulation of tobacco to the FDA because there does not appear to be any safe use of tobacco and this is in some tension with the FDA's consumer safety mission.] This latter  involved concerns about vagueness and overbreadth and since it is possible the Act could be amended to overcome this problem, it is the first issue, involving the use of color and brand symbols, that I think is the more interesting one.

The district court wrote "[The plaintiffs] are clearly right when they say that images of packages of their products, simple brand symbols, and some uses of color communicate important commercial information about their products, i.e., what the product is and who makes it.  The government's contrary suggestion -- that all uses of images in tobacco labels and advertising create noninformative associations of the sort likely to encourage minors to use a tobacco product -- is plainly wrong." (Opinion at 14).

The court may have felt that the attempt to link these associations to the use by minors was the "plainly wrong" part.  And it could be the weakness in the argument.  But consider that the "important commercial information" is the brand information and that branding is inextricably linked with all of the  advertising and marketing efforts which attempt to make emotional associations with the brand. Doesn't this argument raise questions about what it means for something to be "informational"?

In any event, I think what we are really talking about here are the property interests in the brand, not the informational aspects of the brand; which is part of why the First Amendment is not a good fit (in my view) for the interests which plaintiffs seek to protect.  And it is worth walking their claims in this case back a bit to consider the interests which led the Supreme Court to create the commercial speech doctrine in the first place and whether the tobacco companies' arguments further those interests or obstruct them. Virginia Pharmacy created a new category of protected speech labeled "commercial speech" on the grounds that commercial speech was important to listeners. It was the interests of the consumers that both justified the protection and which dictated that protection be reserved for truthful speech. The case did not focus on the speakers' right to engage in promotional speech. This makes sense if you are concerned about regulating false or misleading commercial speech. Nevertheless, the Virginia Pharmacy Court apparently thought that truthful commercial speech might be subject to regulation given a governmental interest that was sufficiently compelling to outweigh the speech interests involved.

If we look at the marketing of cigarettes it seems like there are at least three interests that might be called speech interests: (1) the interest of the speaker (here the tobacco companies) in marketing a legal product; (2) the interest of consumers in receiving truthful information about the health consequences of smoking (and perhaps even their interest in being shielded from attempts to manipulate their interest in smoking); and (3) consumer interest in receiving brand information about the product.

The consumers' interest in receiving the promotional information really looks like the least compelling of the possible speech interests. And when weighed against the legitimate governmental interest in promoting public health, it seems particularly puny; especially when you consider that the government's interest in  public health converges with the consumers' purported First Amendment interest in receiving truthful information about the health consequences and dangers of smoking. The interest in consumers receiving the "information" involves in the brand associations seems to me to be far less about the consumers' interests and more about the property interests of the manufacturers.

Of course, at the end of the day these interests can't be neatly or clearly unraveled. But I think protecting branding as a First Amendment issue in this context is not really about speech but about protecting the economic value in the brand. And that does look a lot like Lochner all over again.

Only time will tell whether the courts will continue down this path of converting property interests into speech interests. For the time being I suspect they will. But I predict that at some point this movement will begin to reverse. In terms of tobacco the First Amendment argument seems to be the last best hope for keeping the industry on life support, given that public acceptance of smoking appears to continue to decline.

Administrative, Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Current Affairs, Marketing | Bookmark

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