Opinion ID: 2191418
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: II-C-1 The Challenge to Section 1314 of the Maine Act.

Text: The Superior Court Justice decided that the First-Fourteenth Amendment protections afforded commercial speech were violated by the provisions in Section 1314(1): A person may not procure or cause to be prepared an investigative consumer report on any consumer unless: . . . That person has provided the consumer with clear and conspicuous written notice of the requested procurement or preparation and the consumer has, in turn, given or signed written authorization for each procurement or preparation . . .. The investigative consumer report for which the user must arrange to have this prior written consent of the consumer is defined in Section 1312(7) as a consumer report or portion thereof which includes information bearing on a consumer's character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living which is obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, or associates of the consumer or with others with whom he is acquainted or who may have knowledge concerning any such items of information or by other means. We have already explained that despite indirectness in the manner in which Section 1314(1) restrains commercial speech by Equifax (the indirectness being that the restraint is effectuated through conduct required of users and consumers), the restraint is nevertheless actual, substantial and content-based. Manifestly applicable, then, is the four-part analysis delineated in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp., supra. We first inquire whether the commercial speech thus restrained by Section 1314(1) is such commercial speech as is constitutionally protected. Central Hudson Gas & Electric, supra, establishes that commercial speech which (1) is more likely to deceive the public than to inform it, or (2) is related to illegal activity is excluded from First-Fourteenth Amendment protection. Id. at 2350. Neither Section 1314(1) itself nor the elaboration of it provided by the definition of investigative consumer report says anything that refers in terms to deceptive or misleadingly inaccurate information, or that purports to confine the applicability of the restraint imposed to the reporting of such information. Yet, the defendant Attorney General contends the commercial speech regulated by Section 1314(1) must be held excluded from First-Fourteenth Amendment protections, as being more likely to deceive . . . than to inform. Basically, the Attorney General's position is that by their very nature as aggregates of information relating to the personal characteristics of a consumer that are collected from interviews with third persons and by other means inviting highly subjective judgments, investigative reports will most of the time, if not always, be inaccurate and misleading and, therefore, should not be treated as constitutionally protected commercial speech. We reject this argument. We cannot presume that inevitably, or generally, investigative consumer reports are deceptive or misleading, especially since the particular record before us refutes any such presumption by its affirmative showing, unrefuted, that material inaccuracies turn up in only a small number of investigative consumer reports. [9] We do not overlook that in Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Association, supra , the Supreme Court of the United States was willing, without actual evidentiary support in that case, simply on the basis of the general literature and Federal Trade Commission reports to regard the activity there prohibited, i. e., in-person solicitation by an attorney, as inherently conducive to over-reaching and other forms of misconduct. See Ohralik, supra, 436 U.S. at 459, n. 23, 98 S.Ct. at 1923. Ohralik, however, involved conduct specially within the knowledge and expertise of the Court itself: the behavior of lawyers and the effects thereof on clients. As to the particular information at issue in the attack on Section 1314(1), we conclude that the general body of secondary literature, or even the congressional legislative history of the Federal Act enacted in 1970, is not too helpful. This information relates to the time when the consumer reporting industry was unregulated. With the advent of tighter federal regulations in regard to reporting methodology, as distinguished from the informational content of reports,  such as requirements for notification of a report's preparation, disclosure of the substance of the report upon request, imposition of strict requirements as to record keeping and filing, and imposition of civil and criminal liability for failure to comply with these regulations,  we cannot presume that the abuses present before and during the early 1970's still persist today, either nationally or in the State of Maine. In applying the first step, then, of the Central Hudson four-step analysis, we conclude that constitutionally protected commercial speech [10] has been subjected under Section 1314(1) to content-based governmental restraint. We proceed, then, to the second step: whether the restraint thus imposed by Section 1314(1) furthers a governmental interest substantial in nature. As Central Hudson says: The State must assert a substantial interest to be achieved by restrictions on commercial speech. Id., ___ at U.S. ___, 100 S.Ct. at 2350. Defendant Attorney General maintains that the governmental interest sought to be achieved by Section 1314(1) is the protection of the citizenry's enjoyment of privacy. That this is a substantial governmental interest is illustrated, says the Attorney General, by the constitutional and tort law protections afforded privacy. One fundamental lesson we learn, however, from the constitutional and tort law approaches to the protection of privacy is that as it is used in common parlance, privacy is an elusive concept. Hence, to avoid confusion, indeed error, in analysis we must recognize that constitutional and tort law protects only particular facets of what the average person my think of as a right to privacy. For example, in those cases where government is acting in a manner claimed by a person to be violative of his privacy, so that a constitutional claim can be made because of the presence of governmental acting, the Supreme Court of the United States has emphasized that only particular zones  of privacy have constitutional protection. See Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 712-13, 96 S.Ct. 1155, 1165-1166, 47 L.Ed.2d 405 (1976). In Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 97 S.Ct. 869, 51 L.Ed.2d 64 (1977) the zones of privacy constitutionally protected, because deemed fundamental or substantial, were classified as comprising generally: (1) matters so personally intimate or worthy of secrecy that government should be precluded from making, or requiring, public disclosure of them and (2) the sphere of decision-making in intimate personal matters of such importance as those relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child rearing and education. Id., at 600, n. 26, 97 S.Ct. at 877, n. 26; see also Paul v. Davis, supra, 424 U.S. at 713, 96 S.Ct. at 1166. Similarly, in the law of torts only particular areas of interest comprehended within what is commonly denominated privacy have been marked out as legally protected. These areas are: (1) the interest in physical or mental solitude or seclusion, as protected from an intrusion thereon which is intentional and yields a highly offensive result; (2) the interest that certain kinds of facts about one's intimate person, or secrets, shall not be given public disclosure; (3) the interest of a person not to be falsely regarded by the public, an interest which is protected against conduct that depicts a person to the public in a false light; and (4) the interest of a person in his name or likeness, which is protected against appropriation for another's benefit or advantage. See Nelson v. Maine Times, Me., 373 A.2d 1221, 1223 (1977); Estate of Berthiaume v. Pratt, Me., 365 A.2d 792, 794 (1976); Restatement (Second), Torts § 652A-E. It would appear, then, that the above delineated particular zones or areas, as intruded upon by the particular conduct described, represent the extent of a governmental interest in protecting privacy that may fairly be taken as being substantial. As we have already explained, the regulatory thrust of Section 1314(1) is concentrated upon investigative consumer reports. By definition such reports provide information bearing on a consumer's character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living . . . obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends or associates of the consumer or with others with whom he is acquainted or who may have knowledge concerning any such items of information or by other means. 10 M.R.S.A. § 1312(7). From this definition it is plain to us that the restraints imposed by Section 1314(1) safeguard only minimally and tangentially, if at all, those particular zones or areas of privacy (from those particular kinds of intrusions) that, as illustrated by constitutional doctrine and the law of torts, generate a governmental interest of protection that may fairly be deemed substantial. This being so, Section 1314(1) must be held unconstitutional because either: (1) the restraint it imposes really does not at all further a substantial governmental interest or (2) if we acknowledge that the restraint may have a degree of relation to a substantial governmental interest, under the third and fourth steps of the Central Hudson four-step analysis the restraint does not directly advance that substantial interest and is more extensive than is necessary to serve it.