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Page Number: 38.0

8 

BARR v. AMERICAN ASSN. OF POLITICAL  
CONSULTANTS, INC. 
Opinion of BREYER, J. 

Indeed,  that  must  be  so  given  that  this  Court’s  First 
Amendment jurisprudence itself ties the constitutional pro-
tection  speech  receives  to  the  content  or  purpose  of  that
speech.  The  Court  has  held  that  entire  categories  of
speech—for example, obscenity, fraud, and speech integral
to criminal conduct—are generally unprotected by the First
Amendment entirely because of their content.  See Miller v. 
California, 413 U. S. 15, 23 (1973) (obscenity); Virginia Bd. 
of  Pharmacy  v.  Virginia  Citizens  Consumer  Council,  Inc., 
425 U. S. 748, 771 (1976) (fraud); Giboney v. Empire Stor-
age & Ice Co., 336 U. S. 490, 498 (1949) (speech integral to 
criminal conduct).  As Justice Stevens pointed out, “our en-
tire First Amendment jurisprudence creates a regime based
on the content of speech.”  R. A. V. v. St. Paul, 505 U. S. 377, 
420  (1992)  (opinion  concurring  in  judgment);  see  id.,  at 
420–422 (providing examples).  Given that this Court looks 
to the nature and content of speech to determine whether,
or  to  what  extent,  the  First  Amendment  protects  it,  it
makes little sense to treat every content-based distinction 
Congress has made as presumptively unconstitutional. 

Moreover, it is no answer to claim that this Court’s prec-
edents categorically require such an analysis.  See ante, at 
9, n. 5 (plurality opinion).  Our First Amendment jurispru-
dence has always been contextual and has defied straight-
forward reduction to unyielding categorical rules.  The idea 
that broad language in any one case (even Reed) has cate-
gorically determined how content discrimination should be
applied in every single context is both wrong and reflects an
oversimplification and over-reading of our precedent.  The 
diversity  of  approaches  in  this  very  case  underscores  the 
point that the law here is far from settled.  Indeed, the plu-
rality itself disclaims the idea that its rule would apply to 
unsettle  “traditional  or  ordinary  economic  regulation  of
commercial activity,” indicating that the plurality presum-
ably thinks there are some outer bounds to its broad lan-
guage.  Ante, at 9.  The question here is whether the Court’s