Court Opinion

ID: 9431777
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:33:10.850218+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:30.148566
License: Public Domain

Justice Scalia,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I think it sufficient to decide this case to rely upon the third ground set forth in the Court’s opinion, ante, at 540 and this page: that a law cannot be regarded as protecting an in*542terest “of the highest order,” Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U. S. 97, 103 (1979), and thus as justifying a restriction upon truthful speech, when it leaves appreciable damage to that supposedly vital interest unprohibited. In the present case, I would anticipate that the rape victim’s discomfort at the dissemination of news of her misfortune among friends and acquaintances would be at least as great as her discomfort at its publication by the media to people to whom she is only a name. Yet the law in question does not prohibit the former in either oral or written form. Nor is it at all clear, as I think it must be to validate this statute, that Florida’s general privacy law would prohibit such gossip. Nor, finally, is it credible that the interest meant to be served by the statute is the protection of the victim against a rapist still at large — an interest that arguably would extend only to mass publication. There would be little reason to limit a statute with that objective to rape alone; or to extend it to all rapes, whether or not the felon has been apprehended and confined. In any case, the instructions here did not require the jury to find that the rapist was at large.
This law has every appearance of a prohibition that society is prepared to impose upon the press but not upon itself. Such a prohibition does not protect an interest “of the highest order.” For that reason, I agree that the judgment of the court below must be reversed.