Coalition Life v. Carbondale

On August 15, the Liberty Justice Center filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Coalition Life v. Carbondale, a case challenging the restrictions imposed on free speech by “bubble zone” laws.

In January 2023, the city of Carbondale, Illinois, enacted a law creating 100-foot “bubble zones” around all entrances to the city’s hospitals, medical clinics, and healthcare facilities. The law prohibits anyone in one of these “bubble zones” from speaking to another person “for the purpose of . . .  engaging in oral protest, education, or counseling.” Although specifically enacted to prohibit pro-life advocacy near abortion clinics, the law’s broad application to all healthcare facilities has created over 150 “bubble zones” across the city where people are prohibited from exercising their right to free speech.

In May 2023, Coalition Life and the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit to challenge the “bubble zone” law for violating the First Amendment. After lower courts dismissed the case—citing the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision Hill v. Colorado—Coalition Life and the Thomas More Society appealed their case to the Supreme Court.

The Liberty Justice Center’s amicus brief urges the Supreme Court to hear Coalition Life v. Carbondale and overturn Hill v. Colorado. The brief argues that Hill impermissibly allows the government to restrict speech based on its content. Under Supreme Court precedent, courts must apply “strict scrutiny”—the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, which few speech restrictions can survive—to all laws that impose content-based restrictions on speech, like Carbondale’s “bubble zone” law.

“The government cannot create zones where certain types of speech are not allowed. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that content-based restrictions on speech are presumptively unconstitutional. The Court’s decision in Hill v. Colorado—allowing “bubble zone” laws restricting speech, like the one Carbondale adopted—is an outlier in the Court’s First Amendment cases,” said Jeffrey Schwab, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center. “We urge the Supreme Court to overturn Hill to bring more consistency to the Court’s protection of free speech rights.”