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Page Number: 35.0

10 

IANCU v. BRUNETTI 

Opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J. 

save it, the Court should do so.  See Stern v. Marshall, 564 
U. S.  462,  477–478  (2011);  NLRB  v.  Jones  &  Laughlin 
Steel Corp., 301 U. S. 1, 30 (1937). 

II 
Adopting  a  narrow  construction  for  the  word  “scandal-
ous”—interpreting it to regulate only obscenity, vulgarity, 
and  profanity—would  save  it  from  unconstitutionality.
Properly  narrowed,  “scandalous”  is  a  viewpoint-neutral 
form  of  content  discrimination  that  is  permissible  in  the 
kind  of  discretionary  governmental  program  or  limited 
forum typified by the trademark-registration system. 

A 
Content  discrimination  occurs  whenever  a  government
regulates “particular speech because of the topic discussed
or  the  idea  or  message  expressed.”  Reed  v.  Town  of  Gil-
bert, 576 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (slip op., at 6); see also Ward 
v.  Rock  Against  Racism,  491  U. S.  781,  791  (1989)  (“Gov-
ernment  regulation  of  expressive  activity  is  content  neu-
tral so long as it is ‘justified without reference to the con-
tent  of  the  regulated  speech’ ”).    Viewpoint  discrimination
is  “an  egregious  form  of  content  discrimination”  in  which
“the government targets not subject matter, but particular 
views  taken  by  speakers  on  a  subject.”  Rosenberger  v. 
Rector  and  Visitors  of  Univ.  of  Va.,  515  U. S.  819,  829 
(1995).

While  the  line  between  viewpoint-based  and  viewpoint-
neutral  content  discrimination  can  be  “slippery,”  see
Corbin,  Mixed  Speech:  When  Speech  Is  Both  Private  and
Governmental, 83 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 605, 651 (2008), it is in
any event clear that a regulation is not viewpoint discrim-
inatory (or even content discriminatory) simply because it 
has  an  “incidental  effect”  on  a  certain  subset  of  views. 
Ward,  491  U. S.,  at  791.    Some  people,  for  example,  may
have  the  viewpoint  that  society  should  be  more  sexually