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Page Number: 6.0

4 

IANCU v. BRUNETTI 

Opinion of the Court 

II 
This  Court  first  considered  a  First  Amendment  chal-
lenge to a trademark registration restriction in Tam, just 
two Terms ago.  There, the Court declared unconstitutional 
the  Lanham  Act’s  ban  on  registering  marks  that  “dispar-
age”  any  “person[ ],  living  or  dead.”   §1052(a).  The  eight-
Justice  Court  divided  evenly  between  two  opinions  and 
could not agree on the overall framework for deciding the 
case. 
(In  particular,  no  majority  emerged  to  resolve
whether a Lanham Act bar is a condition on a government 
benefit  or  a  simple  restriction  on  speech.)  But  all  the 
Justices agreed on two propositions.  First, if a trademark 
registration bar is viewpoint-based, it is unconstitutional.
See  582  U. S.,  at  ___–___,  ___–___  (opinion  of  ALITO,  J.) 
(slip  op.,  at  1–2,  22–23);  id.,  at  ___–___,  ___  (opinion  of 
Kennedy, J.) (slip op., at 1–2, 5).  And second, the dispar-
agement  bar  was  viewpoint-based.    See  id.,  at  ___–___, 
___–___ (opinion of ALITO, J.) (slip op., at 1–2, 22–23); id., 
at ___–___ (opinion of Kennedy, J.) (slip op., at 2–5). 

The Justices thus found common ground in a core postu-
late of free speech law: The government may not discrimi-
nate  against  speech  based  on  the  ideas  or  opinions  it 
conveys.  See Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of 
Va.,  515  U. S.  819,  829–830  (1995)  (explaining  that  view-
point  discrimination  is  an  “egregious  form  of  content 
discrimination”  and  is  “presumptively  unconstitutional”).
In  Justice  Kennedy’s  explanation,  the  disparagement  bar 
allowed  a  trademark  owner  to  register  a  mark  if  it  was 
“positive”  about  a  person,  but  not  if  it  was  “derogatory.” 
Tam,  582  U. S.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  2).    That  was  the  “es-
sence  of  viewpoint  discrimination,”  he  continued,  because
“[t]he law thus reflects the Government’s disapproval of a 
subset of messages it finds offensive.”  Id., at ___–___ (slip 
op.,  at  2–3).  JUSTICE  ALITO  emphasized  that  the  statute
“denie[d]  registration  to  any  mark”  whose  disparaging
message was “offensive to a substantial percentage of the