Every melodrama requires a villain, and the people currently hysterical about super PAC money in politics blame the 2010 Citizens United decision. The court’s unremarkable logic was that individuals do not forfeit their First Amendment speech rights when they come together in corporate entities or unions to speak collectively.

They’ve made the race for the White House a lot more fair.

EIt simply isn’t the case, as is often alleged, that corporate dollars flowing into the super-PACs that have dominated this political season are undisclosed. And the inconvenient truth for critics of corporate political speech is that among the largest such committees spending money during the Republican nominating campaigns, less than 1 percent of the funds came from publicly traded corporations.

This report explores what super PACs are, how they developed, what they raised and spent in the 2010 election cycle, and issues that appear on the horizon for 2012.

Links to court documents and media coverage of the Supreme Court Citizens United decision.

If you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.

The First Amendment does not allow anyone to pursue his vision of a better world through censorship. Although we'd all love the liars and shouters to be silenced, the First Amendment forbids such censorship precisely because there is no way to agree on who is a liar and who is "too loud."

Toobin’s Citizens United piece is engaging and informative, with exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting of how the decision came to be. Yet the article also contains plenty of subtle (and not-so-subtle) spin in service of Toobin’s broader narrative of an out-of-control conservative court. As a consequence, it paints a somewhat misleading picture of the case and the Court.

Amend the Constitution.

Read the syllabus and opinions on Cornell’s Legal Information Institute website.

A large majority of the country lack even the most basic knowledge of so-called super PACs, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll.