Avis Rent A Car System, Inc. v. Aguilar
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal over a California injunction that barred a rental-car employee from ever using a list of racial slurs at work, over a dissent from Justice Thomas.
Thomas argued the case raised serious First Amendment questions about court orders that ban future speech before it happens, and said the Court should have taken the case to sort out how far anti-harassment laws can go in silencing workplace speech.
How it got here: A jury found harassment under California's employment law and awarded damages; a trial court added an injunction; the California Supreme Court affirmed, and the employee and employer asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review, which it declined.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Latino drivers at an airport rental-car facility sued a coworker and their employer under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act, claiming the coworker repeatedly used slurs and unwanted touching against them. A jury awarded damages, and the trial court also issued an injunction permanently barring the coworker from using a list of racial or ethnic epithets at work and from touching Latino employees without invitation.
The question before the Court
Could a court order banning a rental-car employee from ever saying certain slurs at work, even outside anyone's hearing, violate the First Amendment?
Why it matters
Because the Court declined to hear the case, the California injunction against the employee stands, and lower courts elsewhere get no new guidance from the Supreme Court on when workplace harassment injunctions cross the line into unconstitutional prior restraints on speech. Employers and employees are left with unsettled law on how far anti-harassment rules can regulate speech before liability attaches.
What changes now
Because certiorari was denied, the California Supreme Court's decision upholding the injunction remains in effect, and the underlying case is otherwise concluded. No further Supreme Court review will occur in this case. The First Amendment questions Justice Thomas raised about workplace harassment injunctions remain unresolved by the Court and could resurface in a future case with a fuller factual record.
What this does not decide
A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits, so the Supreme Court did not decide whether the injunction was constitutional, whether workplace harassment laws can validly restrict speech, or how prior-restraint doctrine applies to such laws. Only Justice Thomas's dissent addressed those questions.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Thomas
“Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.”Thomas opens by invoking the strong presumption against court orders that block speech in advance.
Justice Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari, arguing the injunction likely suppressed fully protected speech and was not adequately tailored. He contended a damages remedy would have sufficed, that the order swept in isolated and unheard utterances, and that the difficulty and importance of the First Amendment issues warranted review despite the lack of a circuit split or complete factual record.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Justice Thomas's dissent applied the strong presumption against prior restraints, the rule that court orders blocking speech in advance face the toughest First Amendment scrutiny, tougher than after-the-fact penalties like damages.
- He noted the banned words were not shown to fall into any recognized unprotected category such as fighting words or obscenity, and that the underlying anti-harassment law singled out speech based on its subject matter, making it content-based and constitutionally suspect.
- Even assuming some workplace harassment speech could be restricted consistent with the First Amendment, Thomas reasoned that using an injunction rather than money damages required extra justification that was missing here.
- Applying the tailoring standard from prior injunction cases, Thomas concluded the order swept too broadly because it banned even single, isolated utterances and speech never heard by any Latino employee, without regard to context.
- He concluded that because a damages remedy for future violations could address the harm just as well, the broader, more speech-restrictive injunction was not adequately justified, and the Court should have granted review to resolve these prior-restraint problems.