Source: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/824/public-forum-doctrine
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 06:58:13+00:00

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The public forum doctrine is an analytical tool used in First Amendment jurisprudence to determine the constitutionality of speech restrictions implemented on government property. Courts employ this doctrine to decide whether groups should have access to engage in expressive activities on such property.
First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven Jr. wrote of the concept in a law review article in 1965 titled “The Concept of the Public Forum: Cox v. Louisiana.” The term public forum, however, did not appear in First Amendment cases until the 1970s, and public forum doctrine did not appear until the 1980s.
In the 1980s, the Court articulated the contours of the public forum doctrine in Perry Education Association v. Perry Local Educators’ Association (1983). In Perry, Justice Byron R. White explained that there were three categories of government property for purposes of access for expressive activities.
In the first, “quintessential public forums, the government may not prohibit all communicative activity,” White wrote, explaining that content-based restrictions on speech were highly suspect.
The third category was nonpublic forums. “In addition to time, place, and manner regulations, the state may reserve the forum for its intended purposes, communicative or otherwise, as long as the regulation on speech is reasonable and not an effort to suppress expression merely because public officials oppose the speaker’s view,” White explained.
In the Court’s forum-based approach, the government can impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech in all three categories of property, but has limited ability to impose content-based restrictions on traditional or designated public forums. In determining whether a government property should be classified as a designated public forum, the courts examine the government’s “policy and practice” toward the property and whether the property is conducive to expressive activity, in order to discover the government’s intent, as explained in Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (1985).
In First Amendment cases, the free-speech claimant often argues that the government has discriminated against speech based on viewpoint in some type of public forum. The government sometimes will respond that the public forum doctrine is inapplicable, because the government has engaged in government speech. For example, the Supreme Court ruled in Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans (2015), that the state of Texas did not create a limited or designated public forum with its specialty license plate program. Instead, the specialty license plate program was a form of government speech.
Commentators have criticized the public forum doctrine and its application by the courts. For example, law professors John Nowak and Dan Farber wrote in a 1984 article: “Classification of public places as various types of forums has only confused judicial opinions by diverting attention from the real first amendment issues involved in the cases.” The doctrine nonetheless remains a staple in modern First Amendment jurisprudence.
More recently, First Amendment scholar Aaron Caplan has likened the public forum doctrine to “kudzu,” explaining that “there is not even agreement as to how many levels of forum exist within the public forum doctrine.” (Caplan 654).
Whatever its shortcomings, the public forum doctrine has a pervasive presence in First Amendment free-speech law. In the 2016-2017 term, the U.S. Supreme Court mentioned the concept of public forum in both Matal v. Tam (2017) and Packingham v. North Carolina (2017).
BeVier, Lillian.“Rehabilitating Public Forum Doctrine: In Defense of Categories.” Supreme Court Review (1992): 79–122.
Kalven, Harry, Jr. “The Concept of the Public Forum: Cox v. Louisiana.” Supreme Court Review (1965) 1–32.
Nowak, John, and Dan Farber. “The Misleading Nature of Public Forum Analysis: Content and Context in First Amendment Adjudication.” Virginia Law Review 70 (1984): 1219–1266.
O’Neill, Kevin Francis. “Disentangling the Law of Public Protest.” Loyola Law Review 45 (1999): 411–525.
Saphire, Richard B. “Reconsidering the Public Forum Doctrine.” University of Cincinnati Law Review 59 (1991): 739–788.
Park, Daniel W. “Government Speech and the Public Forum: A Clash between Democratic and Egalitarian Values,” (2010): 113-148.
Caplan, Aaron. “Invasion of the Public Forum Doctrine,” Willamette Law Review 46 (2010): 647 – 676.

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