Court Opinion

ID: 9430672
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:19.315055+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:25.620822
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
with whom Justice Marshall and Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.
The Court concludes that “the greater power to completely ban casino gambling necessarily includes the lesser power to ban advertising of casino gambling.” Ante, at 345-346. Whether a State may ban all advertising of an activity that it permits but could prohibit — such as gambling, prostitution, or the consumption of marijuana or liquor — is an elegant question of constitutional law. It is not, however, appropriate to address that question in this case because Puerto Rico’s rather bizarre restraints on speech are so plainly forbidden by the First Amendment.
Puerto Rico does not simply “ban advertising of casino gambling.” Rather, Puerto Rico blatantly discriminates in its punishment of speech depending on the publication, audience, and words employed. Moreover, the prohibitions, as now construed by the Puerto Rico courts, establish a regime of prior restraint and articulate a standard that is hopelessly vague and unpredictable.
With respect to the publisher, in stark, unabashed language, the Superior Court’s construction favors certain identifiable publications and disfavors others. If the publication (or medium) is from outside Puerto Rico, it is very favored indeed. “Within the ads of casinos allowed by this regulation figure . . . movies, television, radio, newspapers, and trade magazines which may be published, taped, or filmed in the exterior for tourism promotion in the exterior even though they may be exposed or incidentally circulated in Puerto Rico. For example: an advertisement in the New York Times, an advertisement in CBS which reaches us through Cable TV, whose main objective is to reach the potential tourist.” App. to Juris. Statement 38b-39b. If the publication is native to Puerto Rico, however — the San Juan Star, for instance — it is subject to a far more rigid system of *360restraints and controls regarding the manner in which a certain form of speech (casino ads) may be carried in its pages. Unless the Court is prepared to uphold an Illinois regulation of speech that subjects the New York Times to one standard and the Chicago Tribune to another, I do not understand why it is willing to uphold a Puerto Rico regulation that applies one standard to the New York Times and another to the San Juan Star.
With respect to the audience, the newly construed regulations plainly discriminate in terms of the intended listener or reader. Casino advertising must be “addressed to tourists.” Id., at 38b. It must not “invite the residents of Puerto Rico to visit the casino.” Ibid. The regulation thus poses what might be viewed as a reverse privileges and immunities problem: Puerto Rico’s residents are singled out for disfavored treatment in comparison to all other Americans.1 But nothing so fancy is required to recognize the obvious First Amendment problem in this kind of audience discrimination. I cannot imagine that this Court would uphold an Illinois regulation that forbade advertising “addressed” to Illinois residents while allowing the same advertiser to communicate his message to visitors and commuters; we should be no more willing to uphold a Puerto Rico regulation that forbids advertising “addressed” to Puerto Rico residents.
With respect to the message, the regulations now take one word of the English language — “casino”—and give it a special opprobrium. Use of that suspicious six-letter word is permitted only “where the trade name of the hotel is used even though it may contain a reference to the casino.” Id., at 39b. The regulations explicitly include an important provision— *361“that the word casino is never used alone nor specified.” Ibid. (The meaning of “specified” — perhaps italicization, or boldface, or all capital letters — is presumably left to subsequent case-by-case adjudication.) Singling out the use of a particular word for official sanctions raises grave First Amendment concerns, and Puerto Rico has utterly failed to justify the disfavor in which that particular six-letter word is held.
With respect to prior restraint, the Superior Court’s opinion establishes a regime of censorship. In a section of the opinion that the majority fails to include, ante, at 335, the court explained:
“We hereby authorize the publicity of the casinos in newspapers, magazines, radio, television or any other publicity media, of our games of [chance] in the exterior with the previous approval of the Tourism Company regarding the text of said ad, which must be submitted in draft to the Company. Provided, however, that no photographs, or pictures may be approval of the Company.” App. to Juris. Statement 38b (emphasis added).
A more obvious form of prior restraint is difficult to imagine.
With respect to vagueness, the Superior Court’s construction yields no certain or predictable standards for Puerto Rico’s suppression of particular kinds of speech. Part of the problem lies in the delineation of permitted speech in terms of the audience to which it is addressed. The Puerto Rico court stated that casino ads within Puerto Rico are permissible “provided they do not invite the residents of Puerto Rico to visit the casino, even though such announcements may incidentally reach the hands of a resident.” Id., at 38b. At oral argument, Puerto Rico’s counsel stated that a casino advertisement in a publication with 95% local circulation — perhaps the San Juan Star — might actually be permissible, so *362long as the advertisement “is addressed to tourists and not to residents.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 26. Then again, maybe not. Maybe such an ad would not be permissible, and maybe there would be considerable uncertainty about the nature of the required “address.” For the Puerto Rico court was not particularly concerned with the precise limits of the oddly selective ban on public speech that it was announcing. The court noted: “Since a clausus enumeration of this regulation is unforeseeable, any other situation or incident relating to the legal restriction must be measured in light of the public policy of promoting tourism.” App. to Juris. Statement 40b. And in a passage that should chill, not only would-be speakers, but reviewing courts as well, the Superior Court expressly noted that there was nothing immutable about its supposedly limiting and saving construction of the restraints on speech: “These guide-regulations may be amended in the future by the enforcing agency pursuant to the dictates of the changing needs and in accordance with the law and what is resolved herein.” Id., at 42b.2
*363The general proposition advanced by the majority today— that a State may prohibit the advertising of permitted conduct if it may prohibit the conduct altogether — bears little resemblance to the grotesquely flawed regulation of speech advanced by Puerto Rico in this case.3 The First Amendment surely does not permit Puerto Rico’s frank discrimination among publications, audiences, and words. Nor should sanctions for speech be as unpredictable and haphazardous as the roll of dice in a casino.
I respectfully dissent.

 Perhaps, since Puerto Rico somewhat ambivalently regards a gambling casino as a good thing for the local proprietor and an evil for the local patrons, the ban on local advertising might be viewed as a form of protection against the poison that Puerto Rico uses to attract strangers into its web. If too much speech about the poison were permitted, local residents might not only partake of it but also decide to prohibit it.

 The unpredictable character of the censorship envisioned by the Superior Court is perhaps illustrated by its decision, apparently sua sponte, Tr. of Oral Arg. 43, to invalidate a regulation that required male patrons of casinos to wear dinner jackets. See ante, at 337, n. 4. The Superior Court explained:
“The classification that we do find suspicious, and which came to our attention during the course of this cause of action, ACAA v. Enrique Bird Pinero, C. A. 1984 Number 46, is the one made in section 4(e) of the Gaming Regulation (15 R. R. P. R. Sec. 76-a4[e]) requiring that the male tourist wear a jacket within the casino. On one hand, Puerto Rico is a tropical country. Adequate informal wear, such as the guayabera, is in tune with our climate and allows the tourist to enjoy himself without extreme, and in our judgment unconstitutional, restrictions on his stay on the Island. On the other hand, said requirement does not improve at all the elegant atmosphere that prevails in our casinos, since the male player may be forced to wear a horribly sewn jacket, so prepared to prevent people from taking them, which to a certain point is degrading for the man and discriminatory, since women are allowed into the casino without any type of requirement for formal wear. The Honorable Supreme Court in Figueroa Ferrer, *363supra, stated: ‘parliaments are not the only necessary agents of social change’ and ‘when you try to maintain a constitutional scheme alive, to preserve it in harmony with the realities of a country, the court’s principal duty is to legislate towards that end, with the tranquility and circumspection which its role within our governmental system demands, without exceeding the framework of its jurisdiction.’ To save the constitutionality of the Law under our consideration, we must bend the requirement of formal wear since this is basically a condition of sex and the State has no reasonable interest which would warrant a dissimilar classification.” App. to Juris. Statement 35b-36b.
Apparently, the Superior Court felt that Puerto Rico’s unique brand of local censorship, like the guayabera, was “in tune” with Puerto Rico’s climate; it is the obligation of this Court, however, to evaluate the regulations from a more universal perspective.

 Moreover, the Court has relied on an inappropriate major premise. The fact that Puerto Rico might prohibit all casino gambling does not necessarily mean that it could prohibit residents from patronizing casinos that are open to tourists. Even under the Court’s reasoning, discriminatory censorship cannot be justified as a less restrictive form of economic regulation unless discriminatory regulation is itself permissible.