Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 387.0

529US1

Unit: $U42

[10-11-01 11:58:08] PAGES PGT: OPIN

312

ERIE v. PAP’S A. M.

Opinion of Souter, J.

In Turner I, for example, we stated that

“[w]hen the Government defends a regulation on speech
as a means to redress past harms or prevent anticipated
harms, it must do more than simply ‘posit the existence
of the disease sought to be cured.’ Quincy Cable TV,
Inc. v. FCC, 768 F. 2d 1434, 1455 (CADC 1985).
It must
demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely
conjectural, and that the regulation will in fact alleviate
Id., at 664
these harms in a direct and material way.”
(plurality opinion).

The plurality concluded there, of course, that the record,
though swollen by three years of hearings on the Cable Tele-
vision Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992,
was insufﬁcient to permit the necessary determinations and
remanded for a more thorough factual development. When
the case came back to us, in Turner II, a majority of the
Court reiterated those requirements, characterizing the en-
quiry into the acceptability of the Government’s regulations
as one that turned on whether they “were designed to ad-
dress a real harm, and whether those provisions will allevi-
ate it in a material way.”
520 U. S., at 195. Most recently,
in Nixon, we repeated that “[w]e have never accepted mere
conjecture as adequate to carry a First Amendment burden,”
528 U. S., at 392, and we examined the “evidence introduced
into the record by petitioners or cited by the lower courts in
this action . . . ,” id., at 393.

The focus on evidence appearing in the record is consistent
with the approach earlier applied in Young v. American
Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50 (1976), and Renton v. Play-
time Theatres, Inc., 475 U. S. 41 (1986).
In Young, Detroit
adopted a zoning ordinance requiring dispersal of adult
theaters through the city and prohibiting them within 500
feet of a residential area. Urban planners and real estate
experts attested to the harms created by clusters of such
theaters, see 427 U. S., at 55, and we found that “[t]he record