Court Opinion

ID: 9482969
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:06:41.055731+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:19.800023
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge, concurring:
I continue to believe that the “public forum” classifications artificially complicate the judicial assessment of time, place or manner restrictions. See Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Turner, 893 F.2d 1387, 1397-99 (D.C.Cir.1990) (concurring opinion). The present case seems a useful illustration; we would reach exactly the same result without public forum analysis. Whether the court is applying the “three-pronged” test for a time, place or manner restriction in a public forum, or a “reasonableness” test for such a restriction elsewhere, the key issue is the compatibility of the forbidden speech with the purposes to which the site is dedicated. Thus, in evaluating the solicitation ban in Kokinda, both the four-justice plurality and Justice Kennedy, concurring, addressed the compatibility of solicitation with the intended uses of the Post Office entrance walk, compare 110 S.Ct. at 3122-24 (plurality), with id. at 3125-26 (Kennedy, J.), though Justice Kennedy assumed that the walk might be a public forum and the plurality affirmatively found the opposite. Indeed, here the main role of “forum” analysis has been to extend the briefs, as both parties (necessarily) addressed the sidewalks’ characteristics both in the forum analysis and then in assessment of the ban; in addition, both briefs made that assessment under two assumptions, the existence and the non-existence of a public forum. And while forum analysis adds the allure of seemingly discrete analytic steps, the decisions suggest, as I argued earlier, that it adds little in real predictability.