Facts
- Los Angeles Municipal Code § 28.04 prohibited posting signs on public property, including utility poles and similar structures.
- Taxpayers for Vincent, a political association, supported a city council candidate and hired Candidates’ Outdoor Graphics Service (COGS) to fabricate and post campaign signs.
- COGS attached cardboard campaign signs to utility pole crosswires at various locations.
- City employees routinely removed all posters attached to utility poles and other objects covered by the ordinance, including the campaign signs.
- The plaintiffs sued for damages and injunctive relief, alleging the ordinance violated the First Amendment.
- The district court upheld the ordinance and entered summary judgment for the City.
- The Ninth Circuit reversed, concluding the City had not justified a total ban on all signs.
- The Supreme Court granted review.
Issues
- Whether a content-neutral prohibition on posting signs on public property violates the First Amendment as applied to political campaign signs.
- Whether the ordinance is facially invalid under the First Amendment overbreadth doctrine.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and upheld § 28.04 in a 6–3 decision.
- The Court held the ordinance was constitutional as applied to the plaintiffs’ expressive activity.
- The Court declined to invalidate the ordinance on its face under the overbreadth doctrine.
Legal Principles
- A content-neutral regulation aimed at aesthetics may satisfy the First Amendment if the governmental interest is unrelated to suppressing expression.
- A municipality may treat the accumulation of signs on public property as a substantial aesthetic harm within its power to address.
- Content-neutral limits on the location of expression may be upheld as time, place, and manner restrictions when narrowly tailored to the asserted interest and leaving open ample alternative channels of communication.
- Narrow tailoring is met when the regulation targets the source of the identified harm and restricts no more speech than necessary to accomplish its goal.
- Facial overbreadth invalidation is inappropriate when the law’s effect on third parties is not materially different from its effect on the litigants, and when the law can be validly applied in many circumstances.
Conclusion
The Court upheld Los Angeles’s ban on posting signs on public property as a content-neutral, narrowly tailored time, place, and manner restriction serving a substantial aesthetic interest while leaving speakers other effective means to communicate, and it rejected a facial overbreadth attack where no distinct third-party speech burden was shown.