Sign Regulation After Reed: Suggestions for Coping with Legal Uncertainty

FOLLOWING THE U.S. SUPREME COURT’S 2015 DECISION IN REED V. TOWN OF GILBERT, ARIZONA. In Reed, all nine Supreme Court justices agreed that the Town of Gilbert’s sign code violated the guarantee of freedom of speech in the First Amendment, although the justices arrived at that conclusion in different ways. As this article will discuss, the Court’s opinion in Reed focused on the appropriate meaning of content neutrality as a central requirement of the First Amendment with respect to the regulation of noncommercial speech, such as signs. Since the early 1970s, the Supreme Court has required that regulations of speech must avoid any regulation of message or subject matter under the theory that government control of the content of speech—like government control of viewpoint— equates to government control of ideas. In so holding, the Court has broadly classified content regulation as a suspect form of speech regulation, and has subjected so-called “content based” regulation to