Los Angeles Police Department v. United Reporting Publishing Corp.
The Supreme Court ruled that a company selling arrestees' address information to attorneys and other businesses could not mount a broad, face-of-the-statute attack on California's law restricting who can get those addresses, because the law only limits access to government records rather than directly restricting anyone's speech.
The decision leaves open whether the law is unconstitutional as specifically applied to this company, sending that narrower question back to the lower courts, and signals that laws controlling access to government information get more First Amendment breathing room than laws directly banning speech.
“California could decide not to give out arrestee information at all without violating the First Amendment.”
The Court's point that states have no obligation to disclose arrestee addresses in the first place.
How it got here: A federal district court granted summary judgment for the company on a facial First Amendment challenge and enjoined the law; the Ninth Circuit affirmed, and the police department sought Supreme Court review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A private publishing company bought lists of recently arrested individuals' names and addresses from the Los Angeles Police Department and resold that information to attorneys, insurance companies, counselors, and driving schools. California amended its public-records law to require anyone requesting arrestee addresses to declare a qualifying purpose (such as journalism or investigation) and promise not to use the address to sell a product or service — a promise the company could not honestly make.
The question before the Court
Could a publishing company that sells arrestees' addresses to lawyers and businesses challenge California's address-disclosure law as unconstitutional on its face, without showing how the law hurt its own speech?
The Court's answer
No — the Court held the company could not win a facial challenge, meaning it could not get the law struck down for every possible use, because the law is really a restriction on who can access government-held arrestee information rather than a direct restriction on speech. Since no speaker faced prosecution just for speaking, there was no risk of scaring off protected expression that would justify letting the company raise other people's rights.
The Court did not decide whether the law is unconstitutional specifically as applied to this company's own situation — that narrower question, along with other arguments the lower courts never reached, goes back for further proceedings.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Governments that release some public records but restrict who can get others (based on how the requester plans to use the information) get more legal room to do so, as long as the restriction is framed as controlling access rather than banning speech outright. Businesses like data brokers, marketers, and investigators that depend on public records may find it harder to challenge access restrictions except through narrower, fact-specific lawsuits.
What changes now
The Ninth Circuit's ruling is reversed, and the case goes back to the lower courts. The company may still pursue an 'as applied' challenge — arguing the law is unconstitutional specifically as it operates against this company — along with other arguments the Court of Appeals never addressed, such as an equal protection claim. This is a final ruling on the facial-challenge question but does not resolve the broader dispute.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the law is unconstitutional as applied specifically to this company, or whether it violates equal protection. Those questions remain open for the lower courts on remand, and the concurring and dissenting justices disagreed sharply about how those questions should ultimately come out.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia agreed the facial challenge failed but stressed that this does not mean an as-applied challenge must fail too. He argued that a law letting the press get information (making it effectively public) while denying it to certain speakers for their own speech purposes might really be a speech restriction in disguise, a question the majority left open.
Concurrence — Justice Ginsburg
Justice Ginsburg agreed the law is a permissible restriction on access rather than speech, reasoning that once information becomes public through approved channels, the statute places no further limits on its use. She argued selective disclosure is like a government subsidy that can be limited to some purposes as long as it isn't based on viewpoint discrimination.
Dissent — Justice Stevens
“the notion that respondent must put itself at risk of 2-to-4 years’ imprisonment in order to raise a constitutional challenge to a state statute is alarming, to say the least.”Stevens's objection to requiring the company to risk criminal liability before it could challenge the law.
Justice Stevens argued the majority mischaracterized the case, since the company had clearly raised both a facial and an as-applied challenge from the start. He contended the law unconstitutionally singles out people who want to use address information for lawful commercial speech, comparing it to viewpoint discrimination, and said the state's privacy justification fails because the same information is freely available to the press and others.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the ordinary rule that a person may not challenge a law as unconstitutional in all its applications (a 'facial challenge') just because it might be applied unlawfully to someone else's situation — normally a challenger must show the law is invalid as applied to their own circumstances.
- The Court recognized a narrow exception for First Amendment 'overbreadth' challenges, which let someone raise the free-speech rights of third parties because an overly broad speech-restricting law can scare people into silence ('chill' protected speech) even before it is ever enforced against them.
- The Court held this exception did not apply here because the statute did not restrict anyone's speech at all — it only controlled who could obtain arrestee address information from the police, a matter of access to government records rather than a direct restriction on what anyone could say.
- Because no one faced prosecution or penalty merely for speaking, and the law did not stop any speaker from using information they already had, there was no risk of an unconstitutional 'chilling' effect that would justify letting the company raise the rights of absent third parties.
- The Court concluded that the company's claim, framed only as a facial attack, could not succeed under these principles, though it left open the possibility that the law might be invalid specifically as applied to this particular company.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms New York v. Ferber (458 U.S. 747)
The Court relied on Ferber's rule that people generally can't challenge laws based on how they might apply to others.
Reaffirms Broadrick v. Oklahoma (413 U.S. 601)
The Court leaned on Broadrick's warning that overbreadth challenges are 'strong medicine' used only as a last resort.