also praise the increase in discourse and available surrounding information about ballot initiatives resulting from the Bellotti decision. Lawyer Francis H. Fox wrote, "[the ruling] perceives that the First Amendment's purposes are better served by allowing the [free] use of means of communication than by enacting legislation designed to foster equality of access to those means." Prentice also noted that the Court acted correctly by protecting the rights of listeners to hear all possible pertinent information. This is the "right to receive" doctrine, which interprets the First Amendment as protecting individuals' right to receive information as part of freedom of communication. Criticisms Critics condemned Bellotti for increasing the influx of corporate money into elections, claiming that this would drown out smaller voices and candidates. Academic George W. Scofield said that corporate speech unrelated to corporate property "becomes the purely personal views of corporate management [and is] undeserving of the constitutional protection afforded by Bellotti." Former Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit J. Skelly Wright said that the rulings in both the First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti and Buckley v. Valeo cases have "given protection to the polluting effect of money in financial campaigns." Wright advocates for "one person, one vote," a concept that meshes with Scofield's concept of aligning the speech of a corporation and of the individuals composing it. Some critics point out that commercial interests and public interests are not always aligned, and that investment from corporations for commercial interests can be detrimental to the formation of public opinion. In an article in The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse said, "the court's speech-protective instincts appear increasingly to serve a deregulatory agenda." Additionally, scholar Carl E. Schneider wrote in the Southern California Law Review that the Court's opinion agreed with previous opinions on the topic of "legislature attempting to govern the political and social power of the business corporation." Schneider writes that the Court misinterpreted the First Amendment and had "problems in understanding social reality." References External links United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court United States Free Speech Clause case law 1978 in United States case law United States elections case law Campaign finance in the United States Bank of America