Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans | |
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Argued March 23, 2015 Decided June 18, 2015 | |
Full case name | John Walker, III, Chairman, Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board, et al., Petitioners v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., et al. |
Docket no. | 14-144 |
Citations | 576 U.S. 200 ( more ) 135 S. Ct. 2239; 192 L. Ed. 2d 274 |
Case history | |
Prior | Summary judgment granted, Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans v. Vandergriff, No. 1:11-cv-01049 (W.D. Tex. April 12, 2013); reversed, 759 F.3d 388 (5th Cir. 2014); cert. granted, 135 S. Ct. 752 (2014). |
Court membership | |
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Case opinions | |
Majority | Breyer, joined by Thomas, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan |
Dissent | Alito, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy |
Laws applied | |
U.S. Const. amend. I |
Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, 576 U.S. 200 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that license plates are government speech and are consequently more easily regulated/subjected to content restrictions than private speech under the First Amendment.
The Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sought to have a specialty license plate issued in the state of Texas with an image of the Confederate Battle Flag. The request was denied prompting the group to sue, claiming that denying a specialty plate was a First Amendment violation. [1]
The majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, relied heavily on the Court's 2009 decision in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum , which stated that a city in Utah was not obliged to place a monument from a minor religion in a public park, even though it had one devoted to the Ten Commandments. The court ruled that refusing the minor monument was a valid expression of government speech that did not infringe on the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. [1] Breyer wrote that the inclusion of a message on a state-issued license plate implies government endorsement of that message, and that car owners "could simply display the message in question in larger letters on a bumper sticker right next to the plate." [1]
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent, arguing that specialty license plates are more commonly regarded as a limited public forum for private expression, consisting of "little mobile billboards on which motorists can display their own messages". Therefore, rejecting the design basically amounts to viewpoint discrimination. [2]
Because of the proximity in time of the Supreme Court's decision with the Charleston church shooting in 2015, the decision was discussed in the media in relation to a controversy that arose in response to the shooting. The massacre was directed at nine African American churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The most notable victim of the shooting, Clementa C. Pinckney, was a senior pastor of the church and the youngest African American man elected to the South Carolina General Assembly in 1996 at the age of twenty-three; the alleged killer, Dylann Roof, was depicted in images with Confederate battle flags on his infamous white supremacist website, including one with a Confederate flag on his license plate. At the time of the shooting, the Confederate battle flag flew on the South Carolina State House grounds.
As an example of Walker's relevance to the controversy, six days after the Charleston shooting, three state governors—Terry McAuliffe of Virginia (a Democrat), Pat McCrory of North Carolina (a Republican), and Larry Hogan of Maryland (a Republican)—announced plans to seek discontinuation of their state's Confederate flag specialty license plates. [3] The governors cited the Supreme Court's decision in Walker in support of their position. [3]
Associate Justice Alito, writing for the dissent, discussed the meaning of the Confederate flag to different social groups:
The Confederate battle flag is a controversial symbol. To the Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans, it is said to evoke the memory of their ancestors and other soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. To others, it symbolizes slavery, segregation, and hatred.
Symbolic speech is a legal term in United States law used to describe actions that purposefully and discernibly convey a particular message or statement to those viewing it. Symbolic speech is recognized as being protected under the First Amendment as a form of speech, but this is not expressly written as such in the document. One possible explanation as to why the Framers did not address this issue in the Bill of Rights is because the primary forms for both political debate and protest in their time were verbal expression and published word, and they may have been unaware of the possibility of future people using non-verbal expression. Symbolic speech is distinguished from pure speech, which is the communication of ideas through spoken or written words or through conduct limited in form to that necessary to convey the idea.
The Gadsden flag is a historical American flag with a yellow field depicting a timber rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. Beneath the rattlesnake are the words "DONT TREAD ON ME". Some modern versions of the flag include an apostrophe.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is an American neo-Confederate nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers that commemorates these ancestors, funds and dedicates monuments to them, and promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
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Choose Life license plates are specialty license plates available in 33 states in the United States that express an anti-abortion message. The plates are the concept of Choose Life, Inc., an anti-abortion advocacy group based in Ocala, Florida. It was founded in 1997 by Randy Harris, a Marion County commissioner, after being inspired by an environmental license plate on the car in front of him to use specialty license plates as a way to raise funds for crisis pregnancy centers, which are nonprofit organizations established to counsel women against receiving abortions. The plates feature the phrase "Choose Life", a slogan used by the anti-abortion movement, and a Microsoft Paint style drawing of two children.
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John Marshall Rogers is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Jerry Edwin Smith is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that New Hampshire could not constitutionally require citizens to display the state motto upon their license plates when the state motto was offensive to their moral convictions.
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Barr v. American Assn. of Political Consultants, Inc., 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the use of robocalls made to cell phones, a practice that had been banned by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), but which exemptions had been made by a 2015 amendment for government debt collection. The case was brought by the American Association of Political Consultants, an industry trade group, and others that desired to use robocalls to make political ads, challenging the exemption unconstitutionally favored debt collection speech over political speech. The Supreme Court, in a complex plurality decision, ruled on July 6, 2020, that the 2015 amendment to the TCPA did unconstitutionally favor debt collection speech over political speech and violated the First Amendment.
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