This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 6, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown. Not everything

uttered by a professional is professional speech, and at any rate, there is no such

distinct category of speech that would afford that speech less First Amendment protection.

That comes from the Supreme Court in the case of the National Institute of Family Life Advocates,

and there would be regulators in the state of California.

Megan DeWitt is a legal associate of the Cato Institute who worked on Cato's brief

in the case we spoke last week.

The Nifla case is about a challenge to the California Reproductive

Fact Act which required two different types of disclosures from crisis

pregnancy centers. One from licensed centers explaining where

women could receive free or low-cost contraceptive and abortion services and

another from unlicensed centers that simply required that they display

in large font a message saying that they were not a licensed medical center.

What are the speech implications here? They're huge. We all thought

that this could have tremendous implications for First Amendment law before the

court's decision came out and essentially that decision just affirmed that indeed this one is pretty far reaching.

It involves scrutiny levels, how strictly, you know, any particular government action has to be examined

and involved whether or not quote-unquote professional speech is a particular

type of speech doctrine and it involved an old case called Zauderer, which is the foundation for a lot of these

compelled disclosures that one sees all over the place tied to products and services.

Now with respect to these crisis pregnancy centers, the same kinds of restrictions are applied to centers that perform abortions, which is have to you have to present this

information you have to give the young lady this information you have to

...