Legal Services Corp. v. Velazquez

Legal Services Corp. v. Velazquez
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 4, 2000 Decided February 28, 2001
Full case name	Legal Services Corporation v. Carmen Velazquez, et al.
Citations	531 U.S. 533 (more) 121 S. Ct. 1043; 149 L. Ed. 2d 63
Case history
Prior	Plaintiffs' motion for injunction denied, 985 F. Supp. 323 (E.D.N.Y. 1997); aff'd in part, rev'd in part, 164 F.3d 757 (2d Cir. 1999)
Subsequent	Permanent injunction granted, 349 F. Supp. 2d 566 (E.D.N.Y. 2004)
Holding
A restriction on advocacy by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) seeking to change welfare law is an unconstitutional viewpoint restriction even though the LSC is a quasi-government entity.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy David Souter · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
Dissent	Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, O'Connor, Thomas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Amend. I; 42 U.S.C. § 2996e(d)(4)

Legal Services Corp. v. Velazquez, 531 U.S. 533 (2001), is a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the constitutionality of funding restrictions imposed by the United States Congress. At issue were restrictions on the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a private, nonprofit corporation established by Congress. The restrictions prohibited LSC attorneys from representing clients attempting to amend (or challenge) existing welfare law. The case was brought by Carmen Velazquez, whose LSC-funded attorneys sought to challenge existing welfare provisions since they believed that it was the only way to get Velazquez financial relief.

The Court ruled that the restrictions violated the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because LSC facilitated "private" speech, that of its grantees, the restrictions did not simply regulate government speech.

Because the restrictions blocked attempts to change only a specific area of law, the Court held, they could not be considered viewpoint-neutral, and the government is prohibited from making such viewpoint-based restrictions of private speech.

Reactions to the decision were mixed within Congress, with Republicans and Democrats disagreeing on the propriety of the decision. Several law review articles argued that the use of a "distortion principle" to decide violations of free speech was an unreasonable and unconstitutional rule whose conditions on funding might "distort" speech advocacy. Others contended that the Court mishandled the interpretation of the statute at issue.