American Freedom Defense Initiative v. King County

Plaintiffs filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging that King County unconstitutionally refused to display plaintiffs' submitted ads concerning global terrorism on the exterior of its public buses. The Ninth Circuit held that the County permissible rejected the factually inaccurate ad because the First Amendment did not require the County to display patently false content in a nonpublic forum. The panel held, however, that the County's disparagement standard discriminated, on its face, on the basis of viewpoint. Finally, the disruption standard was facially valid but the County unreasonable applied the standard to plaintiffs' ad. Accordingly, the court affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's grant of summary judgment to the County. View "American Freedom Defense Initiative v. King County" on Justia Law