A few key points that emerge from a first reading of the Roberts opinion:

1.  The Standard of Review for Contribution Limitations

The Court decides not to address the question directly and so it leaves undisturbed, at least in formal terms, the different standards of review, one rigorous and one less so,  employed for "contributions" and "expenditures," respectively. At the same time, one might ask whether, in any practical application, the differences between these standards matter much at all. This is because the Court continues to insist on a very rigorous definition of the necessary government interest in regulation – actual quid pro quo corruption of candidates or its appearance – and it also rules out an expansive use of anti-circumvention theories, usually highly conceptual as in this case, as a means of satisfying the requirements that any regulation of speech be "closely drawn" to match the government's interest. There will be ample debate in the coming days about whether the Court has effectively adjusted the burden against the government in contribution cases without actually tampering with the standard of review.

Richard Epstein has written about Citizens United before, and he returns to the subject again in his magisterial treatise on the classical liberal conception of the Constitution. His argument includes a challenge to widely held beliefs about corporate political power and motivation . The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014) at 458; see also Richard A. Epstein, Citizens United v. FEC: The Constitutional Right that Big Corporations Should Have But Do Not Want,  34 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 639, 655-660 (2011). He does not suggest that the regulation of government corruption is at all times unfounded or ill-advised, only that it is misdirected to the sphere of public political speech. The analysis he offers usefully raises again the question: is the debate about political reform overly invested in political campaign activity, while attention is paid intermittently and with little impact to other ways that well-financed interests move policy?  These are questions that have been productively raised by other scholars in the field, notably Sam Issacharoff and Rick Pildes.

In the coming campaigns, in 2014 and beyond, political reform is certain to be a topic for discussion. The press will look for a clear statement of the candidate’s positions; the Supreme Court will decide at least one more case that will excite comment and lead to proposals; and certain other prominent issues, such as income inequality and government performance, lead naturally to arguments about campaign finance and lobbying reform. We can imagine, too, that the candidates in addressing these issues will sort out as they most always do—Democrats supporting reform that Republicans find objectionable, with the divide displayed sharply in competing depictions of the soundness and effects of Citizens United.

Back and forth go the arguments over alternatives to the current Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence.   The scholarship it produces can be interesting, and the passions behind it lively, but the question always remains whether constitutional theory can result in manageable guidance to the Court.  This key question is one that Larry Lessig and others advancing an originalist anti-corruption theory of jurisprudence have had difficulty answering.  Without this answer, their work encourages hard-core opponents of any regulation to believe, or to claim, that  the alternative to Buckley—and to the current Court’s gloss on Buckley—is effectively limitless government authority to restrict spending on politics. 

The American Political Science Association Task Force report on political polarization, Negotiating Agreement in Politics (2013) includes a discussion of the role of campaign spending. The co-authors of this analysis, Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, write that the role is small. But they suggest that there is more work to be done, raising the question of whether some spur to polarization might come from the rising importance to candidates of ideologically motivated individual donors.