To use your Park analogy, it would be as if someone rented out a government spokesman and forced him to say something that the government is not in the business of saying...

It doesn't matter who the license plate (or the park) belongs to. It matters who's speaking there.

And, if the government owns the plate, then it's the government speaking..

The ruling is stupid.

I agree...

I don't agree with the ruling.

I understand why they ruled that way...

Michale

It doesn't matter who the license plate (or the park) belongs to. It matters who's speaking there. According to the Court, when two people put contrary slogans on their license plates (both having been approved by the state) it's the state that's expressing its contradictory opinions.

According to the Court, University of Michigan fans aren't expressing their team spirit when they order "Go Blue" license plates: the state of Texas is. Just the same as the state of Texas expresses its support for Michigan State University athletic teams, when someone is issued a "Go Spartans" plate. The owner of the vehicle has nothing to do with it. If such plates happen to be found on vehicles of supporters of the respective teams, that's pure coincidence. Only the state is speaking.

The ruling is stupid.

LEO's can confiscate DLs because the DLs are property of the state and LEOs are representatives of the state..

DOT and LEO officers can also confiscate License Plates because LPs are also property of the state and DOT/LEO are representatives of the state..

Michale

I find that singularly hard to believe...

But it's not that important..

It's like one's Drivers License. It's property of the state that issued it..

Michale

License plates are thus more like a monument that
“endures” than a demonstration or a temporary installation. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/BriefsV5/14-144_pet_reply.authcheckdam.pdf (emphasis added)

That sounds as though the state does not own the license plates.

Texas..

The Justices...

Someone at AP or Reuters wrote it. Everyone else copy-and-pasted it without looking at the original documents.

That's certainly one theory...

Michale

In this case, not giving a link is appropriate: everyone from WBUR to Fox News has the exact text you quoted. But I don't see any basis for it in actual court documents. I looked at the decision yesteday; now I checked the brief for the petitioners. The plates were repeatedly referred to as "state-issued", not "state-owned". I didn't read the whole thing, but if ownership of the plates were the state's main argument, it would have been in what I did read.

Someone at AP or Reuters wrote it. Everyone else copy-and-pasted it without looking at the original documents.

Texas' main argument to the Supreme Court is that the license plate is not like a bumper sticker slapped on the car by its driver. Instead, the state said, license plates are government property, and so what appears on them is not private individuals' speech but the government's. The First Amendment applies when governments try to regulate the speech of others, but not when governments are doing the talking.

Michale

There are a lot of things these days where you have to check a box supposedly agreeing that you've read and understood 9,436,192,015 pages of legal gobbledygook that sounds as though it says your cell phone provider or whoever owns everything you've ever thought, and all your descendants to the 49th generation. Certainly if you want to speak about some company, the company owns its name and logo, without which you can't readily identify the company so as to be able to speak about it. So using someone else's "intellectual property" shouldn't preclude your speech from being your speech.

For me, the bottom line is that whenever there's a public forum, used by lots of people to say whatever they want, the government should not be able to exclude specific viewpoints. Even if it's on government property, and even if it's a new forum rather than a traditional one.

If the government wants to shut down a public forum, it can do so if its property interests would normally allow it to. It can sell off a park, for example, and let someone build on the land, even if the park has been used for speech. But it can't shut down a particular message, even in the course of doing something that its property interests would otherwise allow it to do.

That makes a certain amount of sense to me even though I disagree with the overall decision..

Michale

Onward to the full opinion.

The decision seems to rest on the fact that license plates traditionally are a form of government speech. I guess that's ok by me. Not ideal, but ok. I'm primarily concerned about new media, that aren't traditionally anything one way or another. The precedent is Summum, involving monuments which are indeed a very prominent and longstanding means of government speech.

To me, though, there's a difference: nothing much has changed about monuments. They're still recognizable as almost purely government speech, even when specific private parties are very unequally involved in the political process by which the government is prodded into speaking. With license plates, something has changed. When the government puts one slogan on all its license plates, it's unambiguously government speech. When a government allows car owners to choose from a handful of slogans, it's still pretty unambiguous that that's government speech. But when anyone can put basically anything they like on their license plate, until the government decides to censor a particular viewpoint, that's new. The message is the speech of the person who decided to put it on. Saying that the government has "final approval" (a phrase from Summum, apparently) just means that the government has an opportunity to censor before the fact. But government restraint of speech beforehand is, if anything, even more suspect than responses after the fact.

I will not attempt to provide anything like a comprehensive list, but here are some rules that would not be content based:
Rules regulating the size of signs. These rules may
distinguish among signs based on any content-neutral
criteria, including any relevant criteria listed below.
...
Rules imposing time restrictions on signs advertising a
one-time event

The whole problem with the sign code now apparently turns on the distinction between a weekly event and a one-time event. Seeing that the sign advertises a weekly event requires you to read the sign. That makes it content-based and therefore subject to "strict scrutiny", which it does not pass. So the sign code is unconstitutional. Seeing that the sign advertises a one-time event, by contrast, is done by ESP which the Constitution allows with only intermediate scrutiny. Or something.

Breyer is more reasonable (as I see it). He writes,

The First Amendment requires greater judicial sensitivity both to the Amendment’s expressive objectives and to the public’s legitimate need for regulation than a simple recitation of categories, such as “content discrimination” and “strict scrutiny,” would permit. In my view, the category “content discrimination” is better considered in many contexts, including here, as a rule of thumb, rather than as an automatic “strict scrutiny” trigger, lead
ing to almost certain legal condemnation.

Although nominally concurring, Kagan's opinion (Breyer and Ginsburg joining) reads more like a dissent. In fact, I sound like I'm almost-quoting her above, but I actually wrote that before I read her opinion. Kagan does not elaborate on exactly what standard she would apply. She discusses the problems with the majority's decision, briefly notes some problems with the Town of Gilbert's defunct sign code, and says that she concurs only with the judgment.