Title: First Amendment: Freedom of Speech | LII / Legal Information Institute
Headings: First Amendment: Freedom of Speech
First Amendment: Freedom of Speech
Content: First Amendment: Freedom of Speech | LII / Legal Information Institute
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 2013–2014 TERM IN REVIEW › First Amendment: Freedom of Speech
First Amendment: Freedom of Speech
The First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause affords special protection to certain places traditionally open for speech activities, such as sidewalks and public ways, placing a heavy burden on any government attempt to restrict speech in what the Court has identified as “traditional public fora.” But even in a public forum, the government may impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, or manner of protected speech—so-called time-place-manner restrictions—provided those restrictions are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, that they are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and that they leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information. This term, the Court struck down a particular, highly controversial time-place-manner restriction in Massachusetts, ruling 9–0 in McCullen v. Coakley that a state abortion-clinic buffer-zone law was not narrowly tailored. That buffer-zone law, codified as part of the Massachusetts Reproductive Health Care Facilities Act, made it a crime to knowingly stand on a “public way or sidewalk” within 35 feet of an entrance or driveway to any “reproductive health care facility,” which the Act defined as “a place, other than within or upon the grounds of a hospital, where abortions are offered or performed.” Petitioners, individuals who attempt to engage women approaching Massachusetts abortion clinics in “sidewalk counseling” (which involves offering information about alternatives to abortion and help pursuing those options), claimed that the 35-foot buffer zones displaced them from their previous positions outside the clinics, considerably hampering their counseling efforts. The district court and the First Circuit both ruled the Act to be a reasonable time-place-manner restriction. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts explained that although the act is not content based and is viewpoint neutral, it is not narrowly tailored because it burdens substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests, which he identified as “maintaining public safety on streets and sidewalks and . . .