Stone on License Plates, the First Amendment, and Government Speech

Texas License Plates, the Confederate Flag and the Supreme Court

Back in March, on the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, I wrote a piece examining the "intriguing" First Amendment issue posed by the case. See here.

This week, the Court decided Walker in a sharply-divided five-to-four decision. Like many states, Texas permits drivers to design specialty license plates bearing messages they want to promote. The states that do this do it largely as a way of generating income because they charge for the privilege.

Texas has approved hundreds of different messages on its license plates, including "Choose Life" and "Fight Terrorism," but the Texas Board of Motor Vehicles balked when the Sons of Confederate Veterans sought to include an image of the Confederate flag on the plate that it had designed. The Board denied this proposed license plate under the authority of a provision that authorized it to exclude messages that were likely to offend others. Finding that this was true of the Confederate flag, it rejected the proposal.

The question was whether this was unconstitutional. As I explained in March, the central issue was whether the messages on the license plates should be characterized as "government speech" or as "private speech."

Read more at Huffington Post