## Facts

- Congress enacted the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 (AMAA) to support orderly marketing conditions and fair agricultural prices through collective regulation that displaces competition and is exempt from antitrust laws.
- Under the AMAA, the Secretary of Agriculture may issue marketing orders for specific commodities that set uniform market conditions (including standards and price-related terms) and are approved by two-thirds of affected producers.
- Producer committees appointed under the program administer marketing orders and impose mandatory assessments on producers/handlers to cover administrative costs, including promotion and advertising.
- Marketing orders for California nectarines, plums, and peaches required growers/handlers to pay assessments financing generic commodity advertising (promoting the products generally rather than particular brands).
- Several producers/handlers objected that the compelled payments forced them to subsidize promotional messages they did not control and sometimes disagreed with, allegedly violating the First Amendment.
- Administrative review upheld the advertising requirements; a federal district court upheld the orders, but the Ninth Circuit reversed on commercial-speech grounds.

## Issues

1. Whether the First Amendment is violated when an AMAA marketing order requires producers/handlers to pay mandatory assessments that fund generic commodity advertising.
2. Whether such compelled funding must be evaluated under commercial-speech scrutiny (including the Central Hudson framework) rather than treated as part of a broader economic regulatory program.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit in a 5–4 decision authored by Justice Stevens.
- Mandatory assessments to fund generic advertising, when embedded in the AMAA’s comprehensive marketing-order regime, do not violate the First Amendment.
- The Court rejected applying Central Hudson to invalidate the assessments based on disputes over the relative effectiveness of generic versus brand advertising.
- The Court emphasized that the program neither restrained producers from communicating their own messages nor compelled them to engage in political, ideological, or symbolic speech.

## Legal Principles

- Compelled financial contributions for generic advertising may be upheld when they operate as an ancillary component of a comprehensive, government-created economic regulatory scheme that displaces ordinary market competition.
- A required subsidy for generic commercial promotion does not, by itself, amount to compelled speech where the scheme:
  - does not restrict a producer’s independent speech or brand advertising,
  - does not force endorsement of political or ideological views, and
  - functions as part of collective market regulation approved through statutory mechanisms.
- The First Amendment does not require heightened scrutiny of a financial assessment merely because it incidentally affects the amount a firm can spend on its own advertising.

## Conclusion

The Court held that AMAA marketing-order assessments funding generic advertising for California tree fruits are valid as part of a broader system of economic regulation and do not, on these facts, violate producers’ First Amendment rights.


Glickman v. Wileman Bros. & Elliott, Inc., 521 U.S. 457 (1997)