The speaker's identity does not decide the category. A corporation's editorial supporting tax reform is political speech, while a nonprofit's advertisement selling tickets is commercial. Ask what the communication does. If it proposes a transaction or supplies product information, commercial-speech doctrine may apply; if it argues public policy, the fact that a business paid for the message does not reduce it to advertising.

The analysis begins by asking whether the commercial message concerns lawful activity and is not misleading. Government may prohibit false or inherently misleading claims and proposals for illegal transactions. If the message is truthful, nonmisleading, and concerns lawful activity, Central Hudson asks whether government has a substantial interest, whether the restriction directly advances that interest, and whether the fit is not more extensive than necessary.

This is a meaningful intermediate test, not automatic approval of economic regulation. Government needs evidence or reasoning connecting the restriction to its asserted interest. It ordinarily may not suppress accurate information simply to keep adults from making a lawful choice the government dislikes. At the same time, the test does not always demand the single least restrictive imaginable method.

Disclosure and prohibition are different tools. Government may often require a seller to provide accurate, factual, and noncontroversial information needed to prevent consumer deception, such as a product quantity or material risk. A command to endorse a contested policy position raises a stronger compelled-speech concern. Likewise, ordinary laws against fraud, unsafe products, or unlawful transactions regulate conduct and deception even when words are evidence of the violation.

Commercial speech must also remain separate from obscenity. A sexually explicit advertisement may be evaluated as commercial speech, but explicit content is not automatically obscene. Each asserted category has its own elements.

A state may prohibit an advertisement falsely claiming that an untested drink cures cancer. The government acts against a commercial product claim because it is false and dangerous; it need not treat the deception like a candidate's policy speech. By contrast, a total ban on publishing truthful prices for a lawful medicine would require the state to satisfy the protected-commercial-speech framework.

The presence of money is only a clue, not a conclusion. Identify what the communication does, determine whether it accurately concerns lawful activity, state the government's reason, and then apply the commercial-speech test. Personal offense at an advertisement is not a substitute for falsity, illegality, or a properly supported regulatory interest.

Video lesson: Freedom of Speech: Crash Course Government and Politics #25