A Framework for Judicial Review of Executive Viewpoint Retaliation,” by Simona Grossi

The article is here; here’s the Introduction:

The gravest contemporary threats to expressive freedom do not always take the form of statutes or criminal sanctions. Increasingly, they take the form of procurement decisions, grant terminations, security-clearance revocations, and regulatory designations—the discretionary instruments of executive administration. When the executive deploys these instruments to penalize disfavored viewpoints while preserving the appearance of ordinary governance, it engages in what I have elsewhere called expressive governance. This phenomenon is doctrinally elusive precisely because it operates in domains where courts have long, and for sound institutional reasons, extended substantial deference to executive judgment.

A recent dispute crystallizes the problem. After a leading artificial intelligence company publicly maintained that its models could not be deployed for use in autonomous lethal weapons or the mass surveillance of citizens, and declined contract terms that would have required otherwise, the government designated the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”—a classification historically reserved for foreign adversaries—and moved to foreclose its commercial relationships across the federal defense ecosystem. The designation was framed as a national security judgment. But the sequence of events, the named targeting, and the disproportion of the response suggest a different object: retaliation for protected expression, accomplished through an administrative label. One might resist this inference, reading the episode as the disciplining of a difficult counterparty rather than retaliation for a viewpoint. The framework developed here does not foreclose that reading — it is designed to test it. Part IV takes up the objection directly.

Building on work I have developed elsewhere, this essay shows how the existing First Amendment doctrine supplies the governing principles to address expressive governance but lacks an administrable method calibrated to the low-visibility, discretion-cloaked form the problem now assumes. It then proposes such a method: a framework of three interlocking tools—a clear-statement requirement, a burden-shifting rule, and an evidentiary presumption of systemic distortion where the executive targets expressive intermediaries. The framework neither invents a new tier of scrutiny nor relaxes the deference that executive administration ordinarily warrants. Rather, it allocates proof and construes authority so that genuine managerial decisions remain insulated while viewpoint retaliation cloaked in discretionary form becomes detectable.