Daily Inspiration Quote by Jef I. Richards

Richards is poking a thumb in the eye of legal neatness: commercial speech, he suggests, lives in the same messy neighborhood as obscenity, where judges swear there’s a principled boundary even as they rely on vibes. The line borrows the famous Supreme Court formulation about pornography (Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it”), and that theft is the point. By yoking advertising to obscenity, Richards isn’t claiming ads are pornographic; he’s exposing how the law often treats “commercial” as a category you can intuit faster than you can justify.

The specific intent is diagnostic, not merely snarky. Commercial speech sits in an awkward constitutional tier: protected by the First Amendment, but less protected than political speech. That framework demands definitions because whole regulatory regimes hang on them - labeling rules, disclosure mandates, bans on certain claims. Richards’ quip underlines the fragility of those regimes when the predicate question (“Is this commercial?”) becomes a Rorschach test.

The subtext: what counts as “commercial” is increasingly strategic. Brands do activism, influencers do marketing disguised as diary entries, “content” blurs into pitch. When judges and regulators lean on instinct, they risk laundering personal biases into doctrine: corporate speaker equals suspect; earnest citizen equals noble - until the same message is delivered with a logo.

Contextually, it’s a scholar’s warning about modern persuasion. If we can’t define commercial speech with rigor, we don’t just get sloppy jurisprudence; we give both corporations and the state a loophole big enough to drive an ad campaign through.