Opinion ID: 799252
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: TCA's First Amendment Claim

Text: Although it has standing, TCA nevertheless fails to state a First Amendment claim under Rule 12(b)(6). The grant of a motion to dismiss is reviewed de novo. Owen v. Gen. Motors Corp., 533 F.3d 913, 918 (8th Cir.2008). To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to `state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.' Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009) (quoting Bell Atl. Corp., 550 U.S. at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955). TCA contends that an advocacy organization's First Amendment right to express its ideas, as well as the First Amendment rights of others to receive those ideas, are violated when a state university professor opines that the organization's materials are unreliable and warns students that using those materials in a research paper will result in bad grades. To support its contention, TCA relies primarily upon three Supreme Court cases. Examining each of those three cases in turn, however, convinces us that the complained-of conduct, without more, does not rise to the level of a First Amendment violation. First, TCA relies on Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 102 S.Ct. 2799, 73 L.Ed.2d 435 (1982), in which secondary school students challenged a school board's removal of certain books from school libraries. In Pico, the Supreme Court, citing the right to receive ideas, id. at 867, 102 S.Ct. 2799, ruled that the First Amendment was violated if the school board members  intended by their removal decision to deny [students] access to ideas with which [the school board] disagreed, and if this intent was the decisive factor in [the] decision, id. at 871, 102 S.Ct. 2799. TCA argues that, following Pico, they have stated a First Amendment claim with their allegation that the Center's intent in warning students about the TCA website was to deny access to ideas with which the Center disagreed. The key distinction in Pico is that the books actually were removed from the libraries, substantially impairing the students' ability to access the ideas they contained. See id. at 866, 102 S.Ct. 2799 ([T]he State may not, consistently with the spirit of the First Amendment, contract the spectrum of available knowledge. (quoting Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 482, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965))). Here, in contrast, the spectrum of available knowledge for students at the university was unaffected. There is no allegation that the defendants impaired students' access to the TCA website on a university-provided internet system. There is no hint in the Complaint that university students were not free to, for example, read the TCA website, email material from the TCA website to their friends, regale passers-by on the sidewalk with quotes from the TCA website, and so forth. In short, TCA's website was not removed from the university in any sense. Second, TCA relies on Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 83 S.Ct. 631, 9 L.Ed.2d 584 (1963), in which book publishers challenged a state statute empowering the Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth to declare certain books to be objectionable. Id. at 61, 83 S.Ct. 631. When the Commission identified an objectionable book, it notified the in-state wholesale distributor of the book that the Commission had a duty to recommend prosecution if the Commission viewed the book as obscene. Id. at 62, 83 S.Ct. 631. The Commission typically sent local police officers to inquire what actions the distributor took as a result of the notice. Id. at 63, 83 S.Ct. 631. Distributors subjected to this practice routinely decided to cease their distribution of the challenged book without waiting to see if prosecution was recommended. Id. at 63-64, 83 S.Ct. 631. TCA contends that here, as in Bantam Books, while the state actor did not directly block access to the disfavored material, the state actor's actions chilled others into avoiding the materials. Importantly, however, the Court in Bantam Books found a violation of the First Amendment only because the government actor's acts and practices directly and designedly stopped the circulation of publications in many parts of Rhode Island. Id. at 68, 83 S.Ct. 631. In other words, in 1963, if a book's wholesale distributor decided not to distribute it, it became physically unavailable. In contrast, as discussed above, there is no allegation that the challenged actions here made TCA's website unavailable to students at the university. Finally, TCA contends that Meese v. Keene established the proposition that [g]overnment aspersion on speech to cast suspicion on its credibility with an actual or potential audience is a cognizable First Amendment restriction. While the state senator in Meese successfully established standing, however, his First Amendment challenge failed on the merits because the Act did not pose any obstacle to [his] access to the materials he wishes to exhibit. 481 U.S. at 480, 107 S.Ct. 1862. Likewise, here there is no obstacle to accessing any materials TCA wishes to exhibit on its website; there is merely an obstacle to citation of the material in students' research papers. Schoolwork submitted for grading is designed to please an audience of onethe graderand TCA's attempt to cast this narrow restriction on re-use of its material as a universal ban on distribution is unsupportable. While the Center warned against that narrow type of re-use, it place[d] no burden on protected expression by TCA. See id. In light of the absence of allegations that the challenged actions posed an obstacle to students' access to the materials on TCA's website or made those materials substantially unavailable at the university, the Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal of TCA's First Amendment claim must be affirmed.