You ready?

I was born ready.

Welcome to the Advisory Opinion Podcast. I'm David French with Sarah Isger and before we start, I'm supposed to ask you Sarah, where are you?

I thought I'd give you a little quiz, David. Okay. The year is 1890. And I am in the Wall Street of the South, the second richest city per capita in the United States, and second only to Ellis Island as an immigration port. Where am I?

It's in the South, and it's not going to be a huge city. Otherwise, the answer would be obvious.

I'm so impressed with myself. I can't even tell you. I'm pretty impressed. Listeners, you did not have any clue where I was.

Boy, we can just stop the podcast right now. Alright, so broadcasting, podcasting, sorry, from Galveston. Sarah and I have a great podcast for you.

We're going to talk about a couple of screen court cases, one involving advertising in the first amendment, another one involving Puerto Rico with a fascinating, just as Thomas concurrence, a blistering, just as corsage concurrence.

And then we're going to have a great conversation with UT, the other UT, UT Austin law professors Steve Vladik about emergency DACA to progress more progressive,

just a lot of stuff. So it's, it's a great conversation, and we're going to get to that in the last half of the podcast. But Sarah, should we start with Puerto Rico or should we start with billboards?

Billboards. Alright, billboards. So this was an interesting case. We talked about it before. And honestly, as I was reading through the opinions, I can't remember how I thought this should have come out.

Because I remember talking about it. I know, is that funny? Yeah. So let's just give a little refresh here. Yes.

In some ways, this is a really simple case, but in other ways, it got more complicated, although interestingly in the opinion, it's really just a simple version. So the simple version is this.

What determines whether something is a content-based restriction? Is it any time you have to read the speech, then you know it's content-based, or is there something else we're looking for?

So in the city of Austin, there are billboards. And if you have a billboard at your business, no problem. That is an on-premises billboard, and you can advertise your business.

But if you have an off-premises billboard, then these, there's no more off-premises billboards being built. And the current ones were grandfathered in that they couldn't change their off-premises billboard. They could change the message on it, but they couldn't digitize the signs.

And so some off-premise billboard holder sued, claiming that making this on-premise versus off-premise distinction violated the First Amendment because it wasn't content neutral, it was viewpoint discrimination.

And it should be reviewed under strict scrutiny, meaning the state would have to have, you know, the narrowest restriction possible and a compelling reason to do it.

And so, around and around, we went, David. And in the end, the Supreme Court decided that this was not content-based. It was viewpoint neutral. Well, actually, what they said was it's not strict scrutiny.

Right. Facially content neutral, yeah.

Yeah, facially content neutral, though, perhaps in this case, it's not, and that can all be worked out at the lower court. But David, the real discussion was still about these, whether there's a bright line rule or a common sense rule.

Interesting concurrence by Justice Breyer saying, we don't need to rule at all. It should just be common sense, like, just decide as a judge, like, do you think this is content neutral or not? Whereas the dissenters, I thought, I'll be interested to see what you think, David.

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