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Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation with an annual budget of about $12 million. Most of its funds come from donations by individuals, though it accepts a small portion from for-profit corporations. In January 2008, Citizens United released a 90-minute documentary film entitled Hillary: The Movie. The film mentions Senator Hillary Clinton by name and depicts interviews with political commentators, most of them critical of her. Hillary was released in theaters and on DVD, but Citizens United wanted to increase distribution by making the film available through video-on-demand. In December 2007, a cable company offered to make Hillary available on a video-on-demand channel called Elections '08 for a payment of $1.2 million. The proposal was to make the film available to viewers free of charge. To promote the video-on-demand offering, Citizens United produced two 10-second ads and one 30-second ad. Each ad includes a short statement about Senator Clinton followed by the name of the movie and the movie's website address. Citizens United desired to promote the offering by running the advertisements on broadcast and cable television within 30 days of primary elections. Before the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, federal law prohibited corporations from using general treasury funds to make independent expenditures that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate in connection with certain federal elections. BCRA §203 amended the law to prohibit any electioneering communication. An electioneering communication is any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that refers to a clearly identified candidate for federal office and is made within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election when publicly distributed so that it can be received by 50,000 or more persons in a relevant state. Concerned about possible civil and criminal penalties for violating 2 U.S.C. §441b, Citizens United filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in December 2007. It sought declaratory and injunctive relief, arguing that §441b is unconstitutional as applied to Hillary and that BCRA's disclaimer, disclosure, and reporting requirements are unconstitutional as applied to Hillary and the ads. The District Court denied Citizens United's motion for a preliminary injunction and granted the Federal Election Commission's motion for summary judgment. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction. The case was reargued after the Court requested supplemental briefs addressing whether Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the relevant portion of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission should be overruled.

In 1996 Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act as Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Immediately after the President signed the bill, twenty plaintiffs including the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against the Attorney General challenging the constitutionality of 47 U.S.C. §§ 223(a)(1)(B) and 223(d). A week later a second suit was filed by twenty-seven additional plaintiffs; the cases were consolidated and a three-judge district court was convened. The district court conducted an evidentiary hearing based on a detailed stipulation of 356 paragraphs plus live testimony and made 410 findings of fact. Those findings described the Internet as an international network of interconnected computers that had grown from roughly 300 host computers in 1981 to approximately 9,400,000 by the time of trial, with about 40 million users expected to reach 200 million by 1999. The findings detailed communication methods including e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups, chat rooms, and the World Wide Web, noting that any person or organization with Internet access could publish information and that the content available was as diverse as human thought. The district court further found that sexually explicit material on the Internet included text, pictures, and chat extending from the modestly titillating to the hardest-core, that such material was widely available but users seldom encountered it accidentally because a series of affirmative steps was required to access specific content, and that almost all sexually explicit images were preceded by warnings. The court determined there was no effective way to determine the identity or age of a user accessing material through e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups, or chat rooms and that credit-card or adult-password verification systems were not economically feasible for most noncommercial providers and would impose significant burdens including the exclusion of adults without credit cards. The district court entered a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the two challenged provisions. The Government appealed directly to the Supreme Court under the CDA's special review provisions, and the Court noted probable jurisdiction.

In the late 1990s the Seattle School District No. 1 adopted a student assignment plan for its ten regular public high schools. Incoming ninth graders ranked preferences among schools. The district applied a series of tiebreakers when schools were oversubscribed. The second tiebreaker classified students as white or nonwhite. It selected students whose race would bring an integration-positive school within ten percentage points of the district-wide balance of 41 percent white and 59 percent nonwhite. The plan affected assignments at five oversubscribed schools in the 2000-2001 school year. Petitioner Parents Involved in Community Schools filed suit in the Western District of Washington in July 2000 alleging violations of the Equal Protection Clause. Jefferson County Public Schools had been under a 1975 federal desegregation decree. The decree was dissolved in 2000 after a finding of unitary status. The district adopted a voluntary assignment plan in 2001. The plan required all nonmagnet schools to maintain black enrollment between 15 and 50 percent. The plan grouped elementary schools into clusters. It assigned kindergartners and new students within clusters according to space and racial guidelines. It denied transfer requests that would push a school outside the guidelines. Approximately 34 percent of the district's 97,000 students were black. When Crystal Meredith moved into the district in August 2002 she sought to enroll her son Joshua in kindergarten at Bloom Elementary one mile from their home. The district denied the intercluster transfer from Young Elementary because it would adversely affect desegregation compliance at Young which was then 46.8 percent black. Meredith filed suit in the Western District of Kentucky alleging an Equal Protection violation. The Seattle District Court granted summary judgment to the district in 2001. The Ninth Circuit en banc affirmed the federal constitutional ruling in 2005. The District Court found that Jefferson County had asserted a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools, and that the assignment plan was in all relevant respects narrowly tailored to serve that compelling interest. The Sixth Circuit affirmed in a per curiam opinion relying upon the reasoning of the District Court. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in both cases in 2006.

Spokeo, Inc. operates a website known as a people search engine. Users can input a person's name, phone number, or email address to conduct searches across a wide variety of databases. The site provides personal information about individuals, including address, phone number, marital status, approximate age, occupation, hobbies, finances, shopping habits, and musical preferences. Thomas Robins discovered that a profile generated about him on Spokeo contained several inaccuracies. These included statements that he was married with children, in his fifties, employed, relatively affluent, and holding a graduate degree, when in fact none of this was true. Robins filed a class action complaint in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against Spokeo. He alleged that the company willfully failed to follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of consumer reports as required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The District Court dismissed the complaint, determining that Robins had not properly pleaded an injury in fact. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed that dismissal. It concluded that Robins had adequately alleged injury in fact based on the violation of his statutory rights and the individualized nature of his interests in his credit information. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the case after the Ninth Circuit's decision in 2014.