Chiles v. Salazar

Uh, I'm Justin Smith.

I'm a 1L, and I had a question about Chiles v. Salazar.

Um, you made the distinction, Professor Garnett, about willing participants in therapy.

Yeah.

So they sued and argued that this infringed their First Amendment rights.

And the interesting thing that the state of California did was it argued that it was simply regulating a category of speech that they called professional speech.

And the Ninth Circuit bought that argument and said that professional speech was this special form of lesser protected speech because it was speech that took place in the professional context.

And of course, this was, this was in the context of licensed clinics.

These were clinics that were licensed by the state.

It's licensed professionals.

And the Supreme Court rejected that outright and said, "No, there is no special category of lesser protected speech called professional speech." There are instances where the state may regulate what professionals say in very narrow circumstances, such as what happened in Zauderer or Orolick, where the, where the instances of regulation involved factual, non-controversial information, or it was purely speech incidental to professional conduct.

But here, the speech that was being compelled on the part of these pregnancy resource centers was speech on a very controversial topic, abortion, and speech that directly contradicted the mission of the pregnancy centers.

It's biased towards gender-affirming care when there's people that want gender normative care, and we had that case at the Supreme Court recently.

Did you hear about the Chiles v. Salazar case, Steve?

What, what's the name of the case again?

Chiles v. Salazar.

No, haven't heard about that one.

It's really new.