« Ind. Gov't. - Editorials on IURC firing | Main | Courts - "Facebooking in Court: Coping With Socially Networked Jurors" »

Monday, October 11, 2010

Courts - "2nd Circuit Overturns Religious License Plate Restriction"

The ILB has had a long list of entries on issues relating "specialty license plates," such as "God" plates and "Choose Life" plates.

Today Mark Hamblett of the New York Law Journal reports in a long story that begins:

A state law that prohibits vanity license plates containing religious messages violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

The 2nd Circuit said a Vermont statute that barred a driver from obtaining a vanity plate referring to the Biblical verse John 3:16, "impermissibly restricts expression from a religious viewpoint."

Judges Amalya L. Kearse, Reena Raggi and Debra Ann Livingston said the Vermont law was fatally flawed because it distinguished between people who sought to express secular and religious views "on the same subject" in Byrne v. Rutledge, 07-4375-cv.

[More] How Appealing has just posted a link to this column in Politics Daily by Andrew Cohen, headlined "Vanity Plates, the First Amendment, and a Judge on the Rise." A sample:
Judge Livingston then delivered the coup de grace. "The infirmities in Vermont's application of its own statute are amply demonstrated by the case at bar. Byrne applied for the plate JN36TN, which the state refused to issue because Byrne's supplied meaning indicated his intent to refer to the biblical passage John 3:16. However, as Byrne argues, and the record supports, Vermont would have approved that very same combination had Byrne supplied a secular meaning for it – e.g., `[M]y name is John, I am 36, [and] I was born in Tennessee.'"

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 11, 2010 10:39 AM
Posted to Courts in general