ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Law Professor Scott Gaylord says today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to vacate a lower court decision that had prohibited North Carolina’s “Choose Life” license plate marks an important victory for government speech.
ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Law Professor Scott Gaylord statement on U.S. Supreme Court order to vacate the Fourth Circuit decision in Berger v. ACLU of N.C.
“The Supreme Court’s order granting North Carolina’s petition for certiorari and vacating the Fourth Circuit’s decision prohibiting North Carolina’s ‘Choose Life’ specialty plate marks an important victory for government speech. Third parties can no longer sanitize the public square of views a state communicates simply because they do not like those messages. As the Supreme Court made clear in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, the attempt to censor a message like North Carolina’s ‘Choose Life’ specialty plate is inconsistent with both the purpose of the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s government speech precedents. Walker and Berger should bear directly on a State’s ability to restrict speech that it finds offensive, including the efforts in North Carolina, Virginia, and across the country to remove the Confederate flag from license plates and other forms of government speech.”
is lead counsel in Berger v. ACLU of N.C., a case that until today had been held over in the U.S. Supreme Court until after . In Walker, Professor Gaylord was the author of both the amicus brief on behalf the State of North Carolina and scholarship cited four times in the petitioner’s merits brief in the case.
follows: “The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for further consideration in light of Walker v. Texas Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., 576 U. S. ___ (2015).”
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