08-29-2010, 06:17 PM
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Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: California
Posts: 3,068
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ron Bennett
And you'd be wrong...
"Mall Can't Ban Religious Conversations, Court Says"
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/08/16/29625.htm
The recent case involved the mall imposing rules on the nature of conversations patrons could have ... and the appellate court struck it down - despite the mall being private property, patrons still have some free speech rights there. |
But realizing they had overreached in the early cases, and sensitive to what they had done to private property rights, the Supremes reversed course in Hudgens v. NLRB, a 1976 case holding that the First Amendment guarantees no free speech rights in private shopping centers. And in an important 1980 case, Pruneyard v. Robins, the court upheld the general notion that citizens have no First Amendment rights to express themselves in privately owned shopping centers while still agreeing that a group of California students had the right to hand out leaflets and collect signatures in a private California mall.
The magic bullet in Pruneyard? The high court found that state constitutions may confer upon citizens broader speech rights than the federal Constitution, and the broadly worded California Constitution gave citizens the right to speak freely, even in private malls. The court dismissed the shopping center's claims that such a rule infringed on its free speech rights, by forcing it to tolerate unwanted speech on private property, and rejected the argument that forcing them to open up to public debate constituted an unconstitutional "taking" of private property.
Pruneyard was an invitation from the high court to the states to amend and interpret their own state constitutions to permit free speech in private forums if they so desired. But 23 years later, only six states have joined California in recognizing a state constitutional right to speak and assemble on private property: New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington, and Pennsylvania (and several of them have waffled after doing so). Even the states conferring these broader speech rights do so only on two types of private property?shopping malls and non-public universities?and the only speech protected there is political speech.
http://www.slate.com/id/2079885
In short, Alaska could have expanded their own State Constitution to allow free speech upon private property...but the State decided not to.
Thus, it was correct for security to prevent this man's speech (anti-Obama protest). |
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