Highlands wrote:
New York Magazine sued The MTA over this same sort of issue a number of years back and won. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that because the NYM ads were commercial in nature, The MTA violated NYM's free speech rights in denying them advertising spots on the buses.
Quote:
The Advertisement featured the New York Magazine logo and read, "Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for."
The reason The MTA rejected this ad in the first place is because it hurt Rudy Guiliani's fee fees. Seriously.
Anyhow, I don't think this applies to Geller's issue with The MTA, because her ads are clearly not commercial in nature.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/g ... 79511.htmlHmm, not exactly what that case is saying, methinks. The NYM court 1) held that the side of a MTA bus is a public forum as the MTA has opened it up to both commercial and political speech 2) Applied a "strict scrutiny" standard in evaluating the "prior restraint" of refusing to run the ad, 3) found that refusal to run the ad was more extensive than was necessary to protect the government's legitimate interests, 4) opined that this standard should apply to a mixture of
both commercial and political speech.
In many settings, commercial speech has less protection from governmental regulation than political speech, which enjoys the greatest protection under the Constitution. But here, the court expressly declined to apply a lesser standard to a message that mixed political and commercial speech. Finding a "skeptical attitude" toward government in the ad, the court applied the higher standard of protection. The court went even further than SCOTUS however, declaring that it could see no reason why it should not "require procedural safeguards for prior restraints even where commercial speech is involved."
Geller's ads are political in nature and the MTA is operating a public forum (as held in this case). To avoid running the ads, the MTA will need to identify one of the "narrowly defined exceptions to the prohibition against prior restraints, and have "procedural safeguards that reduce the danger of suppressing constitutionally protected speech".
That could be a tall order.