''Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans'', 576 U.S. 200 (2015), was a

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...

case in which the Court held that

license plate A vehicle registration plate, also known as a number plate (British, Indian and Australian English), license plate (American English) or licence plate (Canadian English), is a metal or plastic plate attached to a motor vehicle or trailer for ...

s are

government speech The government speech doctrine, in American constitutional law, says that the government is not infringing the free speech rights of individual people when the government declines to use viewpoint neutrality in its own speech.Hudson, David. The Re ...

and are consequently more easily regulated/subjected to content restrictions than private speech under the

First Amendment First most commonly refers to: * First, the ordinal form of the number 1 First or 1st may also refer to: Acronyms * Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array * Far Infrared a ...

. The Texas Division of the

Sons of Confederate Veterans The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is an American neo-Confederate nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers that commemorates these ancestors, funds and dedicates monuments to them, and promotes the pseudohisto ...

sought to have a specialty license plate issued in the state of Texas with an image of the Confederate Battle Flag. The request was denied prompting the group to sue, claiming that denying a specialty plate was a First Amendment violation.

Opinion of the Court

The majority opinion, written by Associate Justice

Stephen Breyer Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is an American lawyer and retired jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and r ...

, relied heavily on the Court's 2009 decision in '' Pleasant Grove City v. Summum'', which stated that a city in Utah was not obliged to place a monument from a minor religion in a public park, even though it had one devoted to the Ten Commandments. The court ruled that refusing the minor monument was a valid expression of

that did not infringe on the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Breyer wrote that the inclusion of a message on a state-issued license plate implies government endorsement of that message, and that car owners "could simply display the message in question in larger letters on a bumper sticker right next to the plate." Justice

Samuel Alito Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. ( ; born April 1, 1950) is an American jurist who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was Samuel Alito Supreme Court ...

wrote the dissent, arguing that specialty license plates are more commonly regarded as a limited public forum for private expression, consisting of "little mobile billboards on which motorists can display their own messages". Therefore, rejecting the design basically amounts to

viewpoint discrimination Viewpoint discrimination is a concept in United States jurisprudence related to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the Supremacy Clause, supreme law of the United States, Un ...

Charleston shooting

Because of the proximity in time of the Supreme Court's decision with the

Charleston church shooting An Anti-Black racism, anti-black mass shooting and hate crime occurred on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, and one was injured, during a Bible study (Christianity), Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist ...

in 2015, the decision was discussed in the media in relation to a controversy that arose in response to the shooting. The massacre was directed at nine

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The most notable victim of the shooting, Clementa C. Pinckney, was a senior pastor of the church and the youngest African American man elected to the

South Carolina General Assembly The South Carolina General Assembly, also called the South Carolina Legislature, is the state legislature of the U.S. state of South Carolina. The legislature is bicameral and consists of the lower South Carolina House of Representatives and ...

in 1996 at the age of twenty-three; the alleged killer,

Dylann Roof Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American mass murderer, white supremacist and neo-Nazi who perpetrated the Charleston church shooting. During a Bible study on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charle ...

, was depicted in images with Confederate battle flags on his infamous white supremacist website, including one with a Confederate flag on his license plate. At the time of the shooting, the Confederate battle flag flew on the South Carolina State House grounds. As an example of ''Walker''s relevance to the controversy, six days after the Charleston shooting, three state governors—

Terry McAuliffe Terence Richard McAuliffe (born February 9, 1957) is an American businessman and politician who served as the List of governors of Virginia, 72nd governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat ...

of Virginia (a Democrat),

Pat McCrory Patrick Lloyd McCrory (born October 17, 1956) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 74th governor of North Carolina from 2013 to 2017. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 53rd mayor of Charlotte ...

of North Carolina (a Republican), and

Larry Hogan Lawrence Joseph Hogan Jr. (born May 25, 1956) is an American politician who served as the 62nd governor of Maryland from 2015 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party and son of three-term U.S. representative Lawrence Hogan, he served as co-ch ...

of Maryland (a Republican)—announced plans to seek discontinuation of their state's Confederate flag specialty license plates.Jess Bravin
"Governors Seek to Curb Confederate Flag License Plates: Moves follow Charleston mass killing, Supreme Court ruling"
''Wall Street Journal'' (June 23, 2015). The governors cited the Supreme Court's decision in ''Walker'' in support of their position. Associate Justice Alito, writing for the dissent, discussed the meaning of the Confederate flag to different social groups:

References

External links

* {{US1stAmendment Freedom of Speech Clause Supreme Court case law, state=collapsed Sons of Confederate Veterans United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court cases of the Roberts Court United States Free Speech Clause case law 2015 in United States case law Vehicle registration plates of the United States Flags of the Confederate States of America

Opinion of the Court

Charleston shooting

See also

References

External links