R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul 505 U.S. 377 (1992)

AuthorFrederick M. Lawrence
Pages2123-2124

Page 2123

In R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul, the Supreme Court struck down a St. Paul, Minnesota ordinance that proscribed cross-burning and other actions "which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know" will cause "anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender." The Court was unanimous that the law was unconstitutional, but agreed about little else. Four members of the Court?Justices BYRON R. WHITE, HARRY A. BLACKMUN, JOHN PAUL STEVENS, and SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR?concurred in the judgment, but solely on the ground that the ordinance was overly broad, sweeping within its proscription expression that should be protected. It is safe to assume that these Justices would have upheld a narrowly drawn statute that prohibited HATE CRIME. The other five members of the Court, in the MAJORITY OPINION of Justice ANTONIN SCALIA, reached further, characterizing the St. Paul ordinance?and presumably any content-discriminatory hate crime law?as an unconstitutional content-based regulation of speech in violation of the FIRST AMENDMENT.

In R. A. V., the defendant Robert Viktora, then a minor, was accused of burning a cross on the lawn of Russell and Laura Jones and their children, an African American family that had recently moved into the neighborhood. In moving to dismiss the indictment, Viktora asserted both that the ordinance was overbroad and that it was an unconstitutional, content-based restriction on his FREEDOM OF SPEECH. The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected the OVERBREADTH challenge because that court construed the ordinance narrowly to apply only to FIGHTING WORDS, and therefore not to apply to any expression protected by the First Amendment. Although a minority of the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that this limiting construction by the Minnesota court did not save the ordinance from overbreadth, Scalia was prepared to accept that all of the expression reached by the ordinance was proscribable. He thus had to reach the content-based challenge.

Scalia's OPINION FOR THE COURT used a limited categorical approach to the First Amendment. Acknowledging that fighting words, along with other categories of expression such as OBSCENITY and defamation, are not entitled to full First Amendment protection, Scalia asserted that these forms of expression nevertheless enjoy some limited protection and are not "entirely invisible to the Constitution." Within any of these categories, expression may be...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT