Court Opinion

ID: 9634056
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 12:19:47.217483+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:48.452203
License: Public Domain

WARDLAW and FISHER, Circuit Judges,
concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc:
We write to address significant inaccuracies in Judge Bea’s dissent from rehearing en banc.
As the unanimous opinion made clear, this case is not about the school’s recognition of Truth as a school group, but the school creating Truth “as a school-sponsored group.” Truth v. Kent Sch. Dist., 542 F.3d 634, 648 (9th Cir.2008). Our *851concurrence amplified this point, explaining that the government is not required to subsidize expression, including expression through expressive association, within limited forums of its own creation as long as it restricts access to the forum according to reasonable, viewpoint-neutral rules. See Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Expressive Association and Government Subsidies, 58 Stan. L. Rev. 1919,1938-44 (2006) (arguing that the government is not obligated to support expressive association, and only must not discriminate based on viewpoint).
Additionally, we have not created a circuit split with Christian Legal Society v. Walker, 453 F.3d 853 (7th Cir.2006). In Walker, the Seventh Circuit held that the Christian Legal Society showed a likelihood of success on free speech and expressive association claims. In our concurrence, we noted that the Seventh Circuit explicitly stated “that it could not even determine, on the limited record before it, whether the university had created an open, limited, or nonpublic forum.” Truth, 542 F.3d at 652 n. 1 (Fisher & Wardlaw, JJ., concurring). We did not, as Judge Bea asserts, say that the Seventh Circuit applied strict scrutiny to SIU’s alleged violation of CLS’s expressive association rights “because it could not determine” what type of forum was created. Dissent at 16602 (emphasis added). The unanimous opinion’s holding is entirely consonant with the Seventh Circuit: we agreed that viewpoint discrimination is always prohibited no matter what type of forum exists and remanded Truth’s claim that Kent School District applied its nondiscrimination policy in a selective and discriminatory manner for further investigation by the district court.