## Facts

- The City of Erie, Pennsylvania enacted a public indecency ordinance making it an offense to appear in public in a “state of nudity.”
- The ordinance required dancers to wear at least pasties and a G-string, rather than dance totally nude.
- Pap’s A.M., operating an adult entertainment venue featuring nude erotic dancing, sued for declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging the ordinance violated the First Amendment.
- A trial court invalidated the ordinance; an intermediate appellate court upheld it.
- The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held the ordinance violated constitutional protections for expressive conduct, treated it as aimed at suppressing expression, and applied strict scrutiny, finding the ordinance not narrowly tailored.
- After certiorari was granted, Pap’s argued the case was moot because the club had closed and the property had been sold, but Pap’s remained a corporation capable of reopening a similar business.

## Issues

1. Whether the dispute became moot after the respondent ceased operating the nude dancing establishment.
2. Whether a generally applicable public nudity ordinance, requiring minimal clothing for nude dancing, violates the First Amendment when justified by reducing harmful secondary effects.

## Decision

- The Court held the case was not moot because the respondent retained a legally cognizable interest and could resume the challenged activity.
- The Court reversed the state supreme court and remanded.
- A plurality concluded the ordinance was content neutral, addressed asserted secondary effects associated with adult entertainment, and satisfied intermediate scrutiny under United States v. O’Brien.
- The plurality treated nude dancing as expressive conduct receiving limited First Amendment protection, and found the ordinance’s effect on expression minimal because erotic dancing could continue with pasties and a G-string.
- Concurring Justices agreed in the judgment on alternative reasoning, including that a public nudity ban could rest on general moral and police-power grounds without a secondary-effects analysis.
- Dissenting Justices argued the city had not shown sufficient support for the asserted secondary effects and that the clothing requirement functioned as censorship rather than a meaningful response to crime or neighborhood harms.

## Legal Principles

- A case is not moot if the challenged conduct could reasonably recur and the plaintiff retains a concrete interest in the outcome.
- Nude dancing may qualify as expressive conduct but lies at the periphery of First Amendment protection.
- A generally applicable public nudity ordinance may be treated as content neutral when its asserted governmental interest is unrelated to suppressing an erotic message and is directed at harmful secondary effects.
- Regulations of expressive conduct are evaluated under O’Brien when they regulate conduct and impose only incidental limits on expression.
- Under O’Brien, a regulation is valid if (1) within governmental power, (2) furthers an important or substantial interest, (3) the interest is unrelated to suppressing expression, and (4) the incidental restriction is no greater than essential to further that interest.

## Conclusion

The Court held the controversy remained live despite the club’s closure and upheld Erie’s public nudity ordinance as a content-neutral regulation of conduct that permissibly imposed a minimal clothing requirement on nude dancing under O’Brien’s intermediate scrutiny.


City of Erie v. Pap's A.M., 529 U.S. 277 (2000)