Cornell Law Review Volume 41 Article 2 Issue 1 Fall 1955 Invasions of the First Amendment Through Conditioned Public Spending Alanson W. Willcox Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Alanson W. Willcox, Invasions of the First Amendment Through Conditioned Public Spending , 41 Cornell L. Rev. 12 (1955) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol41/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. INVASIONS OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT THROUGH CONDITIONED PUBLIC SPENDING , Alanson W. Willcox* "Congress may withhold all sorts of facilities for a better life," wrote Mr. Justice Frankfurter in the Douds case, "but if it affords them it cannot make them available in an obviously arbitrary way or exact sur- render of freedoms unrelated to the purpose of the facilities."1 The Supreme Court has given us recent and forceful reminder that neither Congress nor a state legislature may provide facilities in an obviously arbitrary way,2 but it has yet to condemn with comparable clarity their conditioning on the surrender of unrelated freedoms. With the growth of public spending for all sorts of purposes, the poten- tialities of control through the power of the purse have grown apace. The most controversial issues at the moment have to do with pressures toward conformity of opinion and association; most conspicuously, pressures exerted through limitations on government or government-financed em- ployment, which is often described as a "privilege" 3 and treated as though it were a bounty; but increasingly, also, pressures through conditioning of other public expenditures and public services.