Page 36 - AVN August 2015

LEGALESE By Clyde DeWitt
Right to Bear Slogans SCOTUS, license plates and the First Amendment
that the author
”The argument
made in the
Ninth Circuit –
that the DMV
cannot reject any
vanity plate
unless the
speech is an
exception to the
First Amendment
(fighting words,
etc.) – appears
to have been
shot down.
LEGAL NEWS
Clyde DeWitt is a Las Vegas and Los Angeles
attorney, whose practice has been focused on
adult entertainment since 1980. He can be
reached at ClydeDeWitt@earthlink.net. More
information can be found at ClydeDeWitt.com.
This column is not a substitute for personal legal
advice. Rather, it is to alert readers to legal issues
warranting advice from your personal attorney.
In a rather curious case, the United States Supreme Court held
that states have the right to decide which organizations can
have vanity license plates and which cannot. The 5-4 decision
had some unusual alliances, with Justice Breyer siding with the
DMV and Justice Alito siding with the First Amendment; one
would have expected the opposite.
As a matter of background, most states issue some variety of
personalized license plates, as you know. The common thread
to these is that the DMV rakes in a little extra cash that way,
although some states donate the extra cash to the cause being
advanced by the branded license plates.
California was an early player in this game, allowing citizens
up to six characters of their choosing. The most requested
plate was “PEACE,” prompted by the anti–Vietnam War
movement. In the early 1980s, California ran out of six-digit
license plate numbers, so it was upped to seven characters, by
which time the tie-dyed hippie generation had evolved into
the Brooks-Brothers-clad yuppie generation, and the most
requested plate was “PORSCHE.”
Now you can’t have just anything written on your license
plate. And the limits to that are subject to controversy. One
example was a Californian who decided that “NO PLATE”
would be cute. However, it backfired when every time
someone in California whose car had no license plate and had
a delinquent parking violation, Mr. “NO PLATE” was tagged
with the fine. The administrative hassle caused by that put an
end to “NO PLATE.”
License plates started as a mechanism for demonstrating
annual payment of the car tax; and they had numbers so that
the police could distinguish one vehicle from another. After
a decade or two of the products of prison sheet-metal shops
containing just numbers, states decided to do a little chamber-
of-commerce-type activity, putting the state motto on the
plate, such as “The Garden State” (New Jersey), “America’s
Dairyland” (Wisconsin), “Live Free or Die” (New Hampshire)
and “Land of Lincoln” (Illinois). There is no truth to the rumor
that Wisconsin proposed “Eat Cheese or Die” for a license-
plate motto.
As an aside, the author can attest that a long-haired 21-year-
old driving a Volkswagen through rural Texas in 1970 with
“Land of Lincoln” plates produced a record number of traffic
stops. The only solution would be illegal: put some kind of
opaque tape over the Illinois state motto.
However, that’s exactly what George Maynard did four
years later: he put a piece of tape over “Live Free or Die,” New
Hampshire’s license-plate state motto. Maynard, you see,
belonged to Jehovah’s Kingdom, the beliefs of which were
contrary to his state’s slogan.
Apparently there wasn’t much crime in Lebanon, New
Hampshire in those days, or the traffic cops were zealous
36 | AVN.com | 8.15