Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 662.0

524US2

Unit: $U95

[09-06-00 18:40:45] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)

617

Souter, J., dissenting

IV

Although I, like the Court, recognize that “facial chal-
lenges to legislation are generally disfavored,” FW/PBS, Inc.
v. Dallas, 493 U. S. 215, 223 (1990), the proviso is the type of
statute that most obviously lends itself to such an attack.
The NEA does not offer a list of reasons when it denies a
grant application, and an artist or exhibitor whose subject
raises a hint of controversy can never know for sure whether
the decency and respect criteria played a part in any decision
by the NEA to deny funding. Hence, the most that we
could hope for in waiting for an as-applied challenge would
be (a) a plaintiff whose rejected proposal raised some risk of
offense and was not aimed at exhibition in a forum in which
decency and respect might serve as permissible selection cri-
teria, or (b) a plaintiff who sought funding for a project that
had been sanitized to avoid rejection. But no one has de-
nied here that the institutional plaintiff, the National Associ-
ation of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO), has representative
standing on behalf of some such potential plaintiffs. See
App. 21–25 (declaration of NAAO’s Executive Director, list-
ing examples of the potentially objectionable works produced
by several member organizations). We would therefore
gain nothing at all by dismissing this case and requiring
those individuals or groups to bring essentially the same
suit, restyled as an as-applied challenge raising one of the
possibilities just mentioned.

In entertaining this challenge, the Court ﬁnds § 954(d)(1)
constitutional on its face in part because there are “a number
of indisputably constitutional applications” for both the “de-
cency” and the “respect” criteria, ante, at 584, and it is hard
to imagine “how ‘decency’ or ‘respect’ would bear on grant
applications in categories such as funding for symphony or-
chestras,” ante, at 583. There are circumstances in which
we have rejected facial challenges for similar reasons.
“A
facial challenge to a legislative Act is, of course, the most
difﬁcult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger