My Recent Georgia Supreme Court Oral Argument

A pair of related cases raising important First Amendment content-discrimination issues in the context of adult entertainment.

This last Wednesday, I argued for appellants in the Georgia Supreme Court in the pair of related cases, Georgia Ass'n of Club Executives v. Georgia and Georgia Ass'n of Club Executives v. O'Connell. It's an interesting case involving some cutting-edge issues of First Amendment law! This is the same case I argued (in the same court) three years ago, now back after a remand, and now in-person instead of on Zoom.

Anyone interested in watching the oral argument can see it on this page (it's the third video on the page). If you want to read the briefs, here's our brief, the state's brief, our reply brief, and our (short) supplemental brief.

Also, here's an article I recently published on the subject in the Journal of Free Speech Law: Taxing Nudity: Discriminatory Taxes, Secondary Effects, and Tiers of Scrutiny.

Thanks to Gary Freed and the legal team at Freed Grant LLC, without whom none of this would have been possible!

Comments

[CJColucci]

I'm rooting for you -- but for all the wrong reasons.

[ReaderY]

In City of Renton v. Playtime Theateres, the Supreme Court identified “adult entertainment” as de facto occupying an intermediate category between fully protected and wholly unprotected speech. Government can treat such contentlt differently from other content based on reasons that wouldn’t pass steict scrutiny muster when applied to other things, applying a kind of de facto intermediate scrutiny.

This means that government is entitled to “discriminate” against “adult entertainment,” subjecting it to restrictions it couldn’t subject other content to. And this in turn means that claiming that government is discriminating against adult entertainment is a non-starter argument. Renton and its progeny established that government is entitled to discriminate against adult entertainment.

The relevant question is, is government discriminating against adult entertainment in a way that goes beyond the kind of discrimination it is entitled to apply? Sasha’s summary of his argument doesn’t even suggest that he made such a case.

[Sasha Volokh]

See our brief at 17–24 (Part VI.B.6), our reply brief at 24–25 (part of Part IV.A), and our supplemental brief at 2–3.