This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 8th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown. Privacy can be important for donors to non-profits.

California didn't quite see it that way.

The Supreme Court's Banta decision rejected the state's claim that it needed donor information

from a wide variety of nonprofits.

Cato's Trevor Burris provides some analysis of the majority and

dissenting opinions and what's likely to come next. What did we know before this

case about associational privacy and I'm going to assume you were not surprised by the outcome here.

Well we knew that the last major decision along these lines was in 1958 and it was called

N-Double ACP versus Alabama.

And in that case, the state of Alabama

was seeking the donor information for the N-W-A-C-P.

Now, of course, in 1958, we have a pretty good idea

of the kind of activities that the N-W-A-P was up to

in Alabama and why officials in Alabama

may want to get that information. The officials in Alabama may want to get that information.

The officials in Alabama claimed, you know, a non-suppressing purpose, right?

Like monitoring the charitable fraud kind of situation, but the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's not going to. the is a right to associational privacy even for donations and that's not terribly

controversial. The framers would have definitely agreed to this that the so for

example the Federalist Papers were written under the pseudonym Publius and common sense by

Thomas Payne was published anonymously for the first three months until he had to reveal

himself for other reasons. And if someone would have said but what about the

...