Opinion ID: 2582512
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The requirement of a state actor

Text: S.O.C./Hillsboro concede that the Constitution does not apply to private conduct; however, they argue that the First Amendment protects the activities of its employees from infringement by the Mirage, a private entity, because the Mirage has functionally assumed the role of the government by excluding their handbillers from a traditional public venue. We cannot agree. The need to apply the public function exception to the application of the state action requirement of the First Amendment has not yet been demonstrated, and therefore, Mirage's exclusion of commercial handbillers does not implicate the First Amendment. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution provides in relevant part that Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech. [17] As applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, it is a guarantee only against abridgment [of the right of free speech] by government, federal or state. [18] The abridgment then must involve some form of government action. As the United States District Court for the District of Nevada explained, this requirement is subject to a limited set of exceptions: The general rule is that the Constitution does not apply to private conduct. See Hudgens v. N.L.R.B., 424 U.S. 507, 513, 96 S.Ct. 1029, 47 L.Ed.2d 196 (1976). There are very limited exceptions to this time honored principle. One occurs in the rare instance where a private actor is performing a function that has traditionally been exclusively performed by the state. See Flagg Bros. v. Brooks, 436 U.S. 149, 156-59, 98 S.Ct. 1729, 56 L.Ed.2d 185 [(1978)]. For example, in Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501, 66 S.Ct. 276, 90 L.Ed. 265 (1946), a private company owned an entire town performing all of the usual municipal functions and owning all the buildings and sidewalks. Id. at 502-03, 66 S.Ct. 276. The Court found that the Constitution applied to the activity in the company owned town. Id. at 508, 66 S.Ct. 276. [19] The public function doctrine created in Marsh is a means of satisfying the state action requirement. The doctrine provides: The state cannot free itself from the limitations of the Constitution in the operation of its governmental functions merely by delegating certain functions to otherwise private individuals. If private actors assume the role of the state by engaging in these governmental functions then they subject themselves to the same limitations on their freedom of action as would be imposed upon the state itself. [20] We conclude that S.O.C./Hillsboro rely on an unintended and overly broad reading of Marsh v. Alabama [21] (holding that company town was the equivalent of government for purposes of First Amendment). First, Marsh has been consistently interpreted to apply to a very narrow set of facts where the entity in question performed `the full spectrum of municipal powers and stood in the shoes of the State.' [22] Second, an overly broad application of the exception to the state action requirement would swallow the rule. We conclude that compelling policy reasons exist in support of a narrow reading of the state action requirement. As Professor Tribe explains: By exempting private action from the reach of the Constitution's prohibitions, it stops the Constitution short of preempting individual libertyof denying to individuals the freedom to make certain choices. . . . Such freedom is basic under any conception of liberty, but it would be lost if individuals had to conform their conduct to the Constitution's demands. [23] We hold that the district court did not err in making a preliminary finding that by owning and maintaining the particular sidewalks at issue in this case, the Mirage is not automatically performing a public function and therefore cannot be held to the Constitutional requirements of the First Amendment.