Opinion ID: 76258
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc.

Text: 23 The Court examined the constitutionality of restrictions on adult entertainment again in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U.S. 560, 111 S.Ct. 2456, 115 L.Ed.2d 504 (1991). Unlike Young, Schad, and Renton, Barnes involved a public indecency statute rather than a zoning ordinance. Confronting this issue for the first time, the Court upheld an Indiana indecency statute that had the effect of requiring dancers in adult establishments to wear pasties and G-strings. Barnes, 501 U.S. at 572, 111 S.Ct. 2456. However, although five justices agreed that the statute should be upheld, they were again unable to agree on a single rationale. 24 Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, recognized that the Court's previous decisions in LaRue, Doran, and Schad implied that nude dancing was expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. Id. at 565, 111 S.Ct. 2456. Accordingly, Chief Justice Rehnquist analyzed the Indiana statute in light of the four-part test for expressive conduct established in O'Brien. Applying this test, he found that the statute was justified despite its incidental limitations on some expressive activity. Id. at 567, 111 S.Ct. 2456. 9 25 Justice Scalia and Justice Souter each wrote separately, concurring in the judgment of the Court but upholding the Indiana statute on different grounds from each other and from the plurality. Justice Scalia found that the statute withstood constitutional challenge, not because it survived the O'Brien test, but because as a general law regulating conduct and not specifically directed at expression, it is not subject to First Amendment scrutiny at all. Id. By contrast, Justice Souter agreed with the plurality that nude dancing was expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment and appropriately analyzed under O'Brien. However, he parted company with them over how to understand and apply O'Brien's second requirement that government regulation of expressive conduct further important or substantial government interests. According to Justice Souter, these interests need not be limited to protecting societal order and morality, as the plurality argued. Instead, like the zoning cases, they should be interpreted to include the State's substantial interest in combating the secondary effects of adult entertainment establishments... [such as] prostitution, sexual assault, and other criminal activity. Id. at 582-83, 111 S.Ct. 2456. 26 Because Justice Souter provided the narrowest grounds for the judgment of the Court in Barnes, his concurrence constitutes the holding of that case under the rule of Marks v. United States for interpreting fragmented Supreme Court decisions. 10 Hence his opinion demands close scrutiny. In identifying secondary effects as an appropriate basis for upholding the Indiana statute, Justice Souter relied heavily on the Supreme Court's decisions in Renton and Young. Though neither of these cases involved nude dancing, Justice Souter reasoned that because nude dancing and the forms of adult entertainment at issue in Young and Renton were plainly of the same character, they were likely to produce the same pernicious effects. Barnes, 501 U.S. at 584, 111 S.Ct. 2456. He thus concluded that the Renton Court's recognition that legislation seeking to combat the secondary effects of adult entertainment need not await localized proof of those effects, id., could be applied to the specific case of nude dancing. Indiana could reasonably rely on the findings and experiences of other similar localities in order to conclude that forbidding nude dancing furthered its interest in preventing secondary effects, and, in that case, the state need not justify those restrictions by its own local studies. Id. at 584, 111 S.Ct. 2456. Hence O'Brien's second prong was satisfied. So too was O'Brien's third condition, since the State's interest in banning nude dancing was not related to the suppression of free expression but resulted from a simple correlation of nude dancing with secondary effects. Id. at 585, 111 S.Ct. 2456. Finally, Justice Souter found that O'Brien's fourth requirement was also met, since the restrictions at issue in Barnes were minor. Pasties and a G-string moderate the expression to some degree, to be sure, but only to a degree. Dropping the final stitch is prohibited, but the limitation is minor when measured against the dancer's remaining capacity and opportunity to express the erotic message. Id. at 587, 111 S.Ct. 2456. 27