“Illinois Revokes ‘October 7’ License Plates”
So reports The National News Desk:
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias revoked five “October 7” license plates from state drivers this week after receiving complaints about them.
One such license plate went viral on X after it was shared by Jewish advocacy organization StopAntisemitism. The image shows the plate surrounded by a “free Palestine” frame.
Here’s the Tweet:
Over 1200 people brutally murdered.
Women and children raped and tortured.
200+ kidnapped, including Americans.And this driver decided to honor the day it happened on his license plate. pic.twitter.com/8m264iPFzN
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) September 12, 2024
Is this constitutional? Well, there’s a hot debate about that, though the rule adopted by most lower courts would suggest the answer is “no.”
The question is whether the license plate is seen as “government speech” or as the driver’s own “private speech.” (The license plate frame is clearly the driver’s private speech.) If it’s government speech, then the government can choose which viewpoints to speak and which not to, much as the government can choose which monuments to put up in a park, or even which monuments to accept when people offer to donate them. If it’s private speech, even within a government-run program—such as, for instance, trademarks within a trademark registration system—then the government must administer the program in a viewpoint-neutral way.
In Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans (2012), the Court held that the license plate background design is government speech, even when the government let various groups propose their own designs (which the government almost always accepted). But most, though not all, lower courts that have considered the question as to the actual license plate letter/number combination on these “vanity plates” have held that these are the driver’s own speech. To quote one recent decision, Overington v. Fisher (D. Del. 2020),
[N]umerous courts since Walker have addressed the alphanumeric text of vanity plates, with varied results. Compare Carroll v. Cr
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