Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-supreme-board-of-sign-review-reed-and-its-aftermath
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 16:18:25+00:00

Document:
First Amendment jurisprudence is fickle. Sometimes it is transformed in prominent, widely known cases, like Citizens United. At other times, it is quieter, lesser known cases that revolutionize the doctrine. One of last summer’s cases, Reed v. Town of Gilbert, falls squarely into the latter category. The Supreme Court’s redefinition of content discrimination in Reed has led to rapid changes in how courts across the country are evaluating First Amendment challenges. Many courts have read the ruling as requiring them to strike down various state and local laws. Other courts have attempted to sidestep the implications of Reed by applying different First Amendment doctrines to evaluate the challenges that come before them. This divergence in the approaches taken by courts in First Amendment cases illuminates the complexity that results when courts try to apply Reed’s expanded content discrimination doctrine to real-world cases.
This approach marked a departure from the existing conception of content discrimination. Until Reed, courts had focused on the second prong—impermissible government justification or purpose—as the primary basis for finding content discrimination.10 But under Reed, impermissible motive is no longer a prerequisite for finding content discrimination: “A law [can be] content based on its face . . . regardless of the government’s benign motive, content-neutral justification, or lack of ‘animus toward the ideas contained’ in the regulated speech.”11 Reed marked the first time that the Court articulated this broader two-pronged definition of content discrimination.
The consequences of the Court’s decision have been twofold. On the one hand, as Justices Breyer and Kagan predicted, lower courts have read Reed to invalidate a wide range of democratically enacted state statutes and local regulations. At the same time, some courts have started to bypass the stringency of strict scrutiny by applying less rigid standards of review under First Amendment doctrines other than content discrimination.
While the Town of Gilbert’s sign code may not have passed “even the laugh test,”26 other courts have found their hands tied as they strike down otherwise reasonable regulations. Indeed, despite attempts by the majority and concurring opinions to limit the scope of Reed, the sweeping effects of the Court’s decision have manifested in the subsequent months.
However, after Reed was handed down, the Seventh Circuit granted a rehearing and struck down the anti-panhandling ordinance.32 As the majority explained in the reversal, Reed “abolishe[d] any distinction between content regulation and subject-matter regulation”33 and made it clear that “a speech regulation targeted at specific subject matter is content based even if it does not discriminate among viewpoints within that subject matter.”34 This was true even if the distinctions were originally implemented in order to make the ordinance less speech-restrictive.35 As a result, the Seventh Circuit’s application of time, place, or manner doctrine to uphold the ordinance in its initial review36 was undone by Reed’s content discrimination doctrine. Indeed, Norton augurs the weakening of time, place, or manner regulations—the First Amendment doctrine that until now has allowed local and state governments to balance their interests in public order with First Amendment interests.
Governments often must balance their interests in protecting free speech with other public interests. In the context of panhandling, the government sought to balance the right to free speech with the desire to regulate solicitations for money in public spaces; in the context of ballot selfies, the government sought to balance the right to free speech with the desire to preserve electoral integrity. But government interests in public order have clearly proven insufficient to preserve state statutes in the face of Reed’s broad proscription on content discrimination. And government attempts to protect private interests have begun to falter in the face of Reed as well.
The South Carolina law differed from the regulations challenged in Arizona, Illinois, and New Hampshire because the asserted government interest was the “protect[ion] of residential privacy and tranquility,”50 as opposed to an interest in public order (as with anti-panhandling ordinances and sign regulations) or the protection of the political process (as with anti-ballot selfie laws). But strict scrutiny spares few statutes, as Justice Kagan suggested. The Reed Court’s decision to expand the category of content discrimination, coupled with strict scrutiny, implies the invalidation of most, if not all, such laws. In fact, these recent lower court cases highlight that narrowly tailoring a restriction risks unintentional content-based regulation; few state interests, whether in public order or private peace, can shield such a statute from being struck down.
While portending the sweeping effects of Reed, Justice Kagan suggested that one route for courts to avoid the mass invalidation of democratically enacted statutes would be to “water down strict scrutiny to something unrecognizable.”51 The danger of this approach is that it would weaken First Amendment protection in cases in which strict scrutiny should apply with full force, as Justice Breyer noted.52 Courts have attempted to avoid this outcome by applying less stringent standards of review under other First Amendment doctrines, such as secondary effects and commercial speech, to uphold regulations in cases where Reed might call for invalidation.
Endeavoring to keep regulations alive, some courts have turned to the secondary effects doctrine. This was the case in a recent First Amendment challenge to the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which regulates the disclosure of “technical data” relating to “defense articles.”53 The plaintiffs, who had posted “technical information regarding a number of gun-related items” on the Internet, were found to have violated the ITAR and challenged its constitutionality.54 Under the Reed framework, the ITAR is subject matter-based regulation, since it regulates speech concerning a specific “topic discussed” (whether it relates to “defense articles”), and therefore should be subject to strict scrutiny. However, the court bypassed Reed and applied the secondary effects doctrine, which finds regulations to be content-neutral “where the regulations are aimed not at suppressing a message, but at other ‘secondary effects.’”55 Although the secondary effects doctrine evolved from a distinct line of cases involving contentious social issues, such as City of Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc.56 (which involved the zoning of adult theatres) and McCullen v. Coakley57 (which involved buffer zones around abortion clinics), the court applied the logic of secondary effects to the case at hand.58 The court held that the ITAR did not regulate the disclosure of technical data based on the “message that [the data] is communicating.”59 Rather, the court focused on the fact that the regulation was “intended to satisfy a number of foreign policy, and national defense goals.”60 The court concluded that the regulation is content-neutral and therefore subject to intermediate scrutiny, which it survives.61 Thus, the court ignored the facially content-based nature of the ITAR and analyzed only the government’s purpose for the law, as was common before Reed. In so doing, the court drew a clear exception for the national security-related regulation and extended the application of the secondary effects doctrine, allowing the law to survive.
Commercial speech doctrine is proving to be a similar byway for courts. In Contest Promotions v. San Francisco, a national company challenged the City of San Francisco’s sign code.62 As a part of its business model, the company leased signage space from stores and used the space to promote its contests to passersby, who were invited to go into the stores and enter the company’s contests.63 The City’s code banned the use of off-site signage while permitting on-site signage, defining the latter as signs “which direct attention to . . . the primary business . . . which is sold, offered or conducted . . . on the premises upon which such sign is located.”64 The company challenged the prohibition of its off-site signage by arguing that the City’s code abridged the company’s right to commercial speech.65 After analyzing the speech restriction under the commercial speech framework—which is much less stringent than strict scrutiny—the court found that the City’s code could be upheld as a constitutional regulation of commercial speech.66 By bypassing the content discrimination analysis, the court avoided Reed’s imposition of strict scrutiny and upheld the city’s sign code.
In sharp contrast to this ruling, a federal district court in Tennessee recently struck down a state law that distinguished between on-site and off-site signs as a content-based regulation that could not withstand strict scrutiny.67 Applying Reed, the court reasoned that the regulation was facially content-based because the only way to determine whether a sign was on-site was by determining whether the content of the sign was sufficiently closely related to the activities conducted on the property where the sign was located.68 Thus, the court in Tennessee took the tack that the court in California had avoided by classifying the San Francisco sign code as a regulation of commercial speech. The two courts approached factually similar cases with different First Amendment reasoning—one applying Reed and one avoiding Reed—and arrived at opposite outcomes. Rulings such as these bring the doctrinal incoherence resulting from Reed into stark relief.
While it remains to be seen if these holdings withstand appellate review, these rulings suggest the various avenues available to courts that are faced with challenges to democratically enacted regulations. These regulations seek to balance First Amendment interests with other government interests, but in so doing, often run up against the categorical rule of Reed. The development of the different First Amendment doctrines and the extent to which they are balanced with or overruled by Reed will determine the scope of content discrimination—and the First Amendment—in future cases. Indeed, advocates supporting regulations that are challenged under Reed may increasingly turn to these other First Amendment doctrines as ways to avoid the heavy hand of Reed. Thus, it remains to be seen whether Justice Kagan’s prediction that Reed could transform the Court into a veritable “Supreme Board of Sign Review”69 turns out to be true.
Urja Mittal is a member of the Yale Law School J.D. Class of 2017. Many thanks to Dean Robert Post and Amanda Shanor for insightful guidance and to Michael Clemente, Joseph Masterman, Joshua Revesz, and the editors of the Yale Law Journal for thoughtful editing.
Preferred Citation: Urja Mittal, The “Supreme Board of Sign Review”: Reed and Its Aftermath, 125 Yale L.J. F. 359 (2016), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-supreme-board-of-sign-review-reed-and-its-aftermath.
See 135 S. Ct. 2218, 2224 (2015).
Id. at 2224-25 (brackets in original).
See id. at 2237-38 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment).
Reed, 135 S. Ct. at 2229 (quoting Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703, 743 (Scalia, J., dissenting)).
Id. at 2239 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment) (quoting id. at 2231 (majority opinion)).
See id. at 2236 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment).
Id. at 2235 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment).
Id. at 2239 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment).
Id. at 2233 (Alito, J., concurring).
768 F.3d 713 (7th Cir. 2014), rev’d, 806 F.3d 411 (7th Cir. 2015).
See 806 F.3d at 412.
See 806 F.3d at 411.
Id. (quoting Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 135 S. Ct. 2218, 2230 (2015)).
See Rideout, 2015 WL 4743731, at *1.
See 796 F.3d 399, 402 (4th Cir. 2015).
Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 135 S. Ct. 2218, 2237 (2015) (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment).
134 S. Ct. 2518 (2014).
See Def. Distributed, 2015 WL 4658921, at *20-21.
See Contest Promotions v. City & Cty. of San Francisco, 100 F. Supp. 3d 835 (N.D. Cal. 2015).
See Thomas v. Schroer, No. 2:13–cv–02987–JPM–cgc, 2015 WL 5231911 (W.D. Tenn. 2015).
Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 135 S. Ct. 2218, 2239 (2015) (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment).
Id. The ordinance originally prohibited Temporary Directional Signs from being posted for more than two hours beforehand or more than one hour afterward. While the litigation was pending, the ordinance was amended to expand the time limit to twelve hours beforehand and one hour afterward. Id. at 2225 n.4.
The Court’s ruling was unanimous, although there were four separate opinions, each individually important. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Sotomayor. Justice Alito wrote a concurrence, which was joined by Justices Kennedy and Sotomayor. Justice Kagan wrote an opinion concurring only in the judgment, which Justices Ginsburg and Breyer joined, and Justice Breyer wrote a separate opinion concurring only in the judgment as well. See id. at 2223.
Id. at 2236 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment) (quoting Williams-Yulee v. Fla. Bar, 135 S. Ct. 1656, 1666 (2015)).
Id. at 2234 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment). At least one lower court judge has echoed Justices Kagan and Breyer on this point: “Few regulations will survive this rigorous standard.” Norton v. City of Springfield, 806 F.3d 411, 413 (7th Cir. 2015) (Manion, J., concurring).
Id. at 2237 (Kagan, J., concurring in the judgment) (quoting id. at 2227, 2230 (majority opinion); id. at 2233 (Alito, J., concurring)).
See id. at 717-18 (noting, inter alia, that subject-matter regulation is “usually allowed” and content-based distinctions are “usually forbidden”). Reed eliminated the distinction between permissible “subject-matter” and impermissible “content-based” regulation that the Seventh Circuit identified in the first Norton ruling. See supra text accompanying notes 8-12. See also Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 791 (1989) (outlining the Court’s test for valid time, place, or manner regulations).
See 806 F.3d at 412. The Seventh Circuit suggested that “the distinctions that plaintiffs call content discrimination appear to be efforts to make the ordinance less restrictive,” presumably by only prohibiting a particular kind of panhandling and not panhandling more generally, “which should be a mark in its favor.” Id. However, the ordinance still fell under the court’s application of Reed. See id. at 412-13.
See Norton v. City of Springfield, 768 F.3d 713, 717-18 (7th Cir. 2014). In the Seventh Circuit’s original decision upholding the anti-panhandling ordinance, the court looked to United States v. Kokinda and International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee, both of which upheld anti-panhandling regulations. See id. at 715. As the Seventh Circuit explained, in those decisions, Justice Kennedy wrote separately to note that the regulations were appropriate under time, place, or manner doctrine, because the regulations were “narrowly tailored,” “reasonable,” and did “not burden substantially more speech than necessary.” Id. at 715-16. In fact, it was the limited nature of the regulation that made it “pernicious content discrimination” in the eyes of the plaintiffs but was “the soul of reasonableness” in the regulation for Justice Kennedy. Id. at 716. The same tension arose in the Seventh Circuit’s reversal of its earlier decision after Reed. See supra note 35.
See Rideout v. Gardner, 123 F. Supp. 3d 218, 2015 WL 4743731 (D.N.H. 2015), appeal filed (1st Cir. 2015); Robert Barnes, Is a Ballot-Booth Selfie Free Speech, or a Threat to the Sanctity of the Secret Vote?, Wash. Post (Aug. 23, 2015), http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/is-a-ballot-booth-selfie-free-speech-or-a-threat-to-the-sanctity-of-the-secret-vote/2015/08/23/89623272-4809-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html [http://perma.cc/VKW4-7W4S] (describing a photograph of a marked ballot as a “ballot selfie”).
An analogous law banning ballot selfies in Indiana was invalidated on similar grounds as a facially content-based regulation. See Ind. Civil Liberties Union v. Ind. Sec’y of State, No. 1:15-CV-01356-SEB-DML, at *19 (D. Ind. 2015). This opinion cited the New Hampshire case, noting that while the two anti-ballot selfies laws were not identical, the Indiana statute “presents many of the same issues and infirmities” as the New Hampshire law. Id. at *8 n.2.
See id. at 2235 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment). According to Justice Breyer, an example of a case in which content discrimination would appropriately trigger strict scrutiny would be the biased regulation of a public forum. Id. at 2234 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment).
Def. Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State, No. 1-15-CV-372-RP, 2015 WL 4658921, at *1-2 (W.D. Tex. 2015).

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