## Facts

- Boston maintained an ordinance (originating in 1862 and later amended) barring any person from making a “public address” on public grounds, including Boston Common, without first obtaining a permit from the mayor.
- William F. Davis, a preacher, delivered an outdoor address on Boston Common on June 10, 1894, without a mayoral permit.
- The Commonwealth charged Davis in the Municipal Court of the City of Boston with making a public address on the Common without a permit and contrary to the city’s ordinances.
- Davis argued the ordinance (as applied to his preaching) violated constitutional protections for free speech and religious expression.
- Davis also contended that his conduct was not a “public address” within the meaning of the ordinance because it consisted of religious preaching rather than the type of speaking the ordinance contemplated.
- Davis was convicted in Municipal Court; the conviction was sustained in the Superior Court, and Davis sought review by exceptions in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
- A prior Massachusetts decision had already upheld a similar ordinance, leaving mainly a question of how to construe the present ordinance’s wording.

## Issues

1. Whether a municipal ordinance requiring a mayoral permit for any public address on Boston Common is unconstitutional as an infringement of free speech or religious preaching.
2. Whether Davis’s open-air preaching on Boston Common fell within the ordinance’s term “public address,” making the permit requirement applicable to his conduct.

## Decision

- The Supreme Judicial Court overruled Davis’s exceptions and sustained his conviction.
- The court treated the ordinance’s constitutionality as settled by precedent and stated that requiring a permit for public addresses on the Common was constitutional.
- The court held that Davis’s preaching constituted a “public address” under the ordinance, so speaking without a permit violated the ordinance.
- The court characterized the ordinance as regulating the use of public grounds rather than suppressing speech generally, and it rejected claims that the ordinance was a pretext aimed at religious preaching.

## Legal Principles

- The legislature (and, by delegation, municipalities) may regulate the uses of public property such as parks and streets, including by conditioning certain activities on obtaining permission.
- Restrictions on speaking in a public park may be treated as permissible conditions on the use of government-controlled property, rather than as categorical bans on expression in general.
- A court will ordinarily apply the plain and ordinary meaning of broad terms such as “public address” to include religious preaching delivered to the public in a park, absent limiting language.
- When a relevant precedent has already upheld the general constitutionality of a regulatory scheme, later challenges may be confined to narrower questions of construction and application.

## Conclusion

The court upheld Boston’s permit requirement for public addresses on Boston Common, reasoning that government may control the manner and purposes for which public grounds are used and that open-air preaching qualifies as a “public address” subject to the ordinance.


Commonwealth v. Davis, 162 Mass. 510, 39 N.E. 113 (1895)