CTIA—The Wireless Association v. City of Berkeley
Cato covers their petition filed to the Supreme Court with CEI and Cause of Action Institute in CTIA—The Wireless Association v. City of Berkeley.
Residents of Berkeley, California are a little bit scared about potential radio-frequency exposure from cellphones. Despite the FCC’s conclusion that there’s “no scientific evidence” linking “wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses,” the city mandated that any party buying or leasing cellphones communicate a specific message to every customer about radio-frequency exposure. Getting bad vibes from that requirement, CTIA (the wireless industry’s trade group) sued Berkeley for violating the First Amendment by compelling that speech.
It’s a cornerstone of First Amendment law that the right to speak necessarily entails the right to remain silent. This principle ensures the freedom of conscience and prevents citizens from being conscripted to serve as unwilling bullhorns for government communications. Likewise, it is a bedrock principle of First Amendment law-recently affirmed by the Supreme Court-that content-based restrictions of speech must survive the strictest scrutiny to pass constitutional muster.
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In ruling against CTIA, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit further eroded that already lax standard of judicial review. Instead of requiring Berkeley to show a need to combat consumer deception — and how the mandated disclosure provision alleviates that need — the Ninth Circuit skipped right over Zauderer to find that compelling speech content posed no constitutional issues because mandated disclosures need only be reasonably related to “non-trivial” government purposes. This dangerous dilution would allow government entities to compel a nearly unending amount of speech on any number of controversial topics, even if the compelled script was itself misleading.
CTIA is now petitioning the Supreme Court to review that flawed decision. The Cato Institute, joined by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Cause of Action Institute, has filed an amicus brief supporting that petition.
Read the full article at Cato.
