In the 1941 case Valentine v. Chrestensen, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that commercial speech was not protected by the First Amendment. The case involved a dispute between F.J. Chrestensen, who owned a former Navy submarine he exhibited for profit, and New York City officials who prohibited him from distributing handbills advertising his exhibit on city streets in an effort to reduce littering. After being denied permission to distribute his flyers, Chrestensen revised them to include a protest against the city's actions on one side while keeping his advertisement on the other side of it; however, this too was rejected by authorities citing local sanitation ordinances prohibiting street distribution of commercial and business advertising matter. Chrestensen sued Maurice Valentine, then Police Commissioner of NYC arguing that these restrictions violated his First Amendment rights but lost at both district court level and appeals court before taking it up with Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld lower courts' decisions stating that purely commercial advertising is not constitutionally protected free speech under First Amendment as its purpose is merely private gain rather than public interest or dissemination of news or opinions.

In the Valentine v. Chrestensen case, there was no recorded dissenting opinion. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that commercial speech did not have the same protections under the First Amendment as other types of speech, thus upholding a New York City ordinance prohibiting distribution of commercial and business advertising matter in streets. This decision has since been partially overturned by later cases which recognized certain free speech rights for commercial entities.