Greater New Orleans Broadcasting Association, Inc., Etc., et al. v. United States et al. (527 U.S. 173)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 14, 1999 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 527 U.S. 173 · 119 S. Ct. 1923
- Decided
- June 14, 1999
- Term
- October Term 1998
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Stevens
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- Federal law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court. Federal law prohibits some, but by no means all, broadcast advertising of lotteries and casino gambling. In United States v. Edge Broadcasting Co., 509 U. S. 418 (1993), we upheld the constitutionality of 18 U. S. C. § 1304 as applied to broadcast advertising of Virginia’s lottery by a radio station located in North Carolina, where no such lottery was authorized. Today we hold that § 1304 may not be applied to advertisements of private casino gambling that are broadcast by radio or television stations located in Louisiana, where such gambling is legal. I Through most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Congress adhered to a policy that not only discouraged the operation of lotteries and similar schemes, but forbade the dissemination of information concerning such enterprises by use of the mails, even when the lottery in question was chartered by a state legislature. Consistent with this Court’s earlier view that commercial advertising was unprotected by the First Amendment, see Valentine v. Chrestensen, 316 U. S. 52, 54 (1942), we found that the notion that “lotteries . . . are supposed to have a demoralizing influence upon the people” provided sufficient justification for excluding circulars concerning such enterprises from the federal postal system, Ex parte Jackson, 96 U. S. 727, 736-787 (1878). We…
Excerpt of a 41,646-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.