Rav v. City of ST. Paul, Minnesota (505 U.S. 377)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 22, 1992 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 505 U.S. 377 · 112 S. Ct. 2538
- Decided
- June 22, 1992
- Term
- October Term 1991
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Scalia
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- Local ordinance held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court. In the predawn hours of June 21,1990, petitioner and several other teenagers allegedly assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs. They then allegedly burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where petitioner was staying. Although this conduct could have been punished under any of a number of laws, one of the two provisions under which respondent city of St. Paul chose to charge petitioner (then a juvenile) was the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, St. Paul, Minn., Legis. Code § 292.02 (1990), which provides: “Whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including, but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” Petitioner moved to dismiss this count on the ground that the St. Paul ordinance was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content based and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment. The trial court granted this motion, but the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed. That court rejected petitioner’s overbreadth claim because, as construed…
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