Opinion ID: 2191418
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 12

Heading: II-D The Challenge to Section 1313.

Text: We proceed to plaintiff's attack, levelled by cross appeal, on the constitutionality of Section 1313 of the Maine Act. [20] The contention, as to which the Superior Court Justice made no decision, is that Section 1313 must be nullified as facially violative of the First-Fourteenth Amendment protections afforded commercial speech. Section 1313 authorizes a consumer reporting agency to furnish a consumer report only in the particular circumstances therein provided. These limitations may give surface suggestion that Section 1313 unduly abridges constitutionally protected commercial speech. From closer examination of them, however, we conclude that the infirmity is more apparent than real. The reason for our conclusion is that regardless of any of the other restrictions imposed, Section 1313(3)(E) allows a consumer report to be furnished to any person whom the consumer reporting agency has reason to believe . . . has a legitimate business need for the information in connection with a business transaction involving the consumer. In effect, then, this provision overrides all the other limitations and permits consumer reports to be furnished in a circumstantial context so essentially unlimited that it may fairly be regarded as leaving commercial speech practically unrestricted. Although circumstances lying outside Section 1313(3)(E), as well as outside the other authorizations in Section 1313(3), may be hypothesized in which the furnishing of consumer reports would be prohibited, thereby to make it arguable that restraints are imposed on constitutionally protected commercial speech, we refuse to nullify Section 1313 in all its applications, i. e., facially, merely because of such hypothetically conceived particular applications likely to be marginal in nature and rarely to occur. We therefore leave for that future case which will involve as reality what may presently be hypothesized by imagination, namely, the determination whether Section 1313 as so applied may transgress, without warrant, constitutionally protected commercial speech. [21]